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Games (Girls can probably skip this post)
Nov. 17th, 2005 10:58 amThanks, everyone, for your cards, e-cards, reminders that I'm now an old man, and so on for my birthday - especially to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quadralien and allly_cs for being absolutely heroic and getting me Red Dwarf VII and Civilization IV, respectively. Civ IV doesn't exactly run on my computer because it's getting on a bit now, but upgrading is what birthday money's for. At the moment I can only see how impressive it looks - very typical of Microprose in the early days, with a polished look and a top quality manual that's so heavy that you have to get someone else to hold it up while you turn the pages.
For the last three years I haven't really played games at all, with a couple of exceptions, but it's only now that I'm getting back into them. At the start of the year I played UT online a lot on the Truff suite of servers after being starved of it on ResNet, and was quickly kicked off the Beginner and Intermediate servers for being too good. After being dumped into the main servers instead, I'm struggling to keep up with the experts.
I installed Diablo 2 a while ago as well. During my last year of school, a lot of my time was spent at home playing that (largely because I only had nine hours of class a week and my first one was last period on a Tuesday) but when I got to the Arcane Sanctuary it was time to pack up and go to St Andrews, so I never finished it.
While playing Diablo 2 there's a continual argument going on in my head, because even after getting back to where I left off I can't decide if it's any good or not. "Stop playing this," one side of my brain will say. "It basically amounts to repeatedly clicking on people."
"But it's clicking on people, avoiding being clicked on and then clicking on stuff to sell later," the other side will argue.
"Stop it - otherwise you'll do something really stupid like post this conversation on your Livejournal," the first side will finish, and go and sulk. The other side will take over, as it knows that there are only 9,234 experience points to go until the next Level Up, and that means my character will be able to learn a new set of spells, and also let me use that enchanted hammer that I picked up a while ago... and the cycle goes on from there. With the arrival of Civ IV just as I've got to the Arcane Sanctuary again, though, all my time will be sucked black hole-like into its shiny interior and I'm doomed never to be able to complete the game.
I also picked up Carmageddon: TDR 2000 at a car boot sale the other week. I had heard that it wasn't as good as the others in the series, but I felt I didn't have much to lose for 50p. I can see why a lot of people were disappointed in it, actually - the whole dynamic of the game has changed, and the emphasis is far more on actually racing now rather than wandering off on your own to explore. You only get two more seconds for running over a zombie even on Easy, and unlike the original two games where you'd regularly get about three minutes added to your timer for ramming an opponent, now it's incredibly pleasing to see even a nineteen-second bonus appear on the screen.
All this means that you've got to zoom through a level on the predetermined track, while shunting people around when the opportunity presents itself - what happened in the previous games was that you'd end up with about four hours on your timer and be free to do pretty much what you wanted, but the timer is capped at about five minutes now. This makes the game a lot faster (indeed, some of them could go on for hours in the other two games), and it could be argued that it stops the levels from all becoming the same, as you have to race on a track rather than explore the same areas repeatedly. It does take some getting used to, though.
The only real problem I have with the game is that I'd like it if it was easier to run over zombies. In the first game you got points for them if one so much as touched your vehicle, in the second game it got a bit more realistic, but now you can hit them at about eighty miles an hour and the most they'll do is moan a bit and then get up again.
Have I finished? Yes, probably, I've got to drive to Architecture now.
quadralien and allly_cs for being absolutely heroic and getting me Red Dwarf VII and Civilization IV, respectively. Civ IV doesn't exactly run on my computer because it's getting on a bit now, but upgrading is what birthday money's for. At the moment I can only see how impressive it looks - very typical of Microprose in the early days, with a polished look and a top quality manual that's so heavy that you have to get someone else to hold it up while you turn the pages.For the last three years I haven't really played games at all, with a couple of exceptions, but it's only now that I'm getting back into them. At the start of the year I played UT online a lot on the Truff suite of servers after being starved of it on ResNet, and was quickly kicked off the Beginner and Intermediate servers for being too good. After being dumped into the main servers instead, I'm struggling to keep up with the experts.
I installed Diablo 2 a while ago as well. During my last year of school, a lot of my time was spent at home playing that (largely because I only had nine hours of class a week and my first one was last period on a Tuesday) but when I got to the Arcane Sanctuary it was time to pack up and go to St Andrews, so I never finished it.
While playing Diablo 2 there's a continual argument going on in my head, because even after getting back to where I left off I can't decide if it's any good or not. "Stop playing this," one side of my brain will say. "It basically amounts to repeatedly clicking on people."
"But it's clicking on people, avoiding being clicked on and then clicking on stuff to sell later," the other side will argue.
"Stop it - otherwise you'll do something really stupid like post this conversation on your Livejournal," the first side will finish, and go and sulk. The other side will take over, as it knows that there are only 9,234 experience points to go until the next Level Up, and that means my character will be able to learn a new set of spells, and also let me use that enchanted hammer that I picked up a while ago... and the cycle goes on from there. With the arrival of Civ IV just as I've got to the Arcane Sanctuary again, though, all my time will be sucked black hole-like into its shiny interior and I'm doomed never to be able to complete the game.
I also picked up Carmageddon: TDR 2000 at a car boot sale the other week. I had heard that it wasn't as good as the others in the series, but I felt I didn't have much to lose for 50p. I can see why a lot of people were disappointed in it, actually - the whole dynamic of the game has changed, and the emphasis is far more on actually racing now rather than wandering off on your own to explore. You only get two more seconds for running over a zombie even on Easy, and unlike the original two games where you'd regularly get about three minutes added to your timer for ramming an opponent, now it's incredibly pleasing to see even a nineteen-second bonus appear on the screen.
All this means that you've got to zoom through a level on the predetermined track, while shunting people around when the opportunity presents itself - what happened in the previous games was that you'd end up with about four hours on your timer and be free to do pretty much what you wanted, but the timer is capped at about five minutes now. This makes the game a lot faster (indeed, some of them could go on for hours in the other two games), and it could be argued that it stops the levels from all becoming the same, as you have to race on a track rather than explore the same areas repeatedly. It does take some getting used to, though.
The only real problem I have with the game is that I'd like it if it was easier to run over zombies. In the first game you got points for them if one so much as touched your vehicle, in the second game it got a bit more realistic, but now you can hit them at about eighty miles an hour and the most they'll do is moan a bit and then get up again.
Have I finished? Yes, probably, I've got to drive to Architecture now.
