A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Howdy y'all. I've been quiet on LJ, even though I've been melting my keyboard under the fury of my frantic typing into Twitter, so feel free to read my recent stuff there. I've been far too deep into the end-of-year gravity well action playset to organize my thoughts into more than 140 characters at a time. (Or, sometimes, more than 280.) I have no doubt that I shall return presently.

However, ahkond recently expressed surprise at my tweeted assertion that I found the Xbox 360 version of Team Fortress 2 more fun to play than the PC version, and I wanted to write up a deeper examination of my reasons in a longer format. So, yes, the rest of this post is video-game neepery, and you will probably want to skip it unless you're into that sort of thing.

Earlier this month, Valve hosted a special TF2 free-play weekend, and I jumped right in, blessing my good fortune that it happened right after I had set up the used PC I'd recently bought from a friend. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that, for one reason or another, the game didn't work very well on my machine. Simply put, my framerate was either rather bad or completely unacceptable, depending upon how many other players were in my immediate vicinity.

Several friends, hearing my dismay over Steam-chat, suggested various fixes: What kind of video card had I installed? Was I running all the latest drivers? Did I google to see if my particular setup need some more patches somewhere? Perhaps I could try playing with some of the game's graphics-quality sliders?

After spending a couple of hours in frantic configuration-wanking abandon, I paused to catch my breath, lift my head, and look down the road. What looked back at me were the dully glimmering eyes of a hundred yaks, all lined up, waiting to be shaved.

Now, I am totally down with people who can get into the sub-hobby / metagame of keeping their PCs up to date with the latest bits n pieces of hardware, drivers, and operating system patches necessary to keep them aloft for another month or two. If that works out for you, then by all means, please pursue it with all due relish.

But, look: A key reason that I enjoy playing video games on consoles (and not PCs) is the same as a key reason I do all my work exclusively on Macs (and not PCs): I don't want to think about any of that stuff. The thought of having to think about any kind of low-level hardware configuration, and the mid-level firmware and software diddling that necessarily comes with it, makes me shudder with dread. I can just feel all the tufts of matted yak-hair scratching against my skin. Ugh.

TF2 is a great game, and it is a shame that I can't currently enjoy its more recent features, since ol' Valve isn't hurrying to add them to the Xbox version. But I am so not into the idea of paying dollar-sign question-mark question-mark question-mark, and burning up gord knows how many hours from my life, just to bring one of my secondary computers the ability to play a game which, er, I already own a perfectly good copy of for my game console. So, yeah. No.

(Also, it happens that I learned to play modern FPSes on the two-stick, two-trigger console controller, and so am quite comfortable with their use, to the perpetual befuddlement of my WASD + mouse-using friends. So be it!)

Hm. I have for many years been carrying around conventional (and therefore quote) wisdom (unquote) that RAM is RAM, supported by the fact that I've never had a memory blowout. Unless I have but I've forgotten...

I didn't get big-name-brand memory (having made the purchase right after joecab's first comment) but I did at least buy from a vendor with a good rating on pricewatch. (There are many vendors with bad ratings, to be sure.)

I bought Baldur's Gate yesterday for about $25 at MCenter. The knowledge that BG2 was OS X native lured me into the store, but that game was also twice as expensive. BG runs OK under classic mode. My main complaint is that there's no obvious way, perhaps no way at all, to background the game; to get to anything else on your machine, you must save and quit. Enh. This game has a 1998 copyright date on it; this was well into the days when many, perhaps most computer users expected to have one window on their desktop dedicated to continual information flow from the Internet. Then again, this was back when very few people had broadband access at home -- I didn't -- so the idea of isolating one's machine from the Net for awhile wasn't completely alien. But now, the game asks me to forget about my incoming email while I'm playing. Foo... if I wanted to do that, I'd go play a human-enabled RPG.

Also, having a broken CD drive latch makes a painful experience out of playing games that rely on disk swappage. Sigh. I'll fix it when next I get money, maybe.

I distinctly remember reading a magazine review of a computer game some dozen or more years ago which opened with the reviewer sighing about the 15 floppies that poured forth from the box upon opening, and his prediction that games would have to start moving toe CD-ROM as a standard format pretty soon. Well, that happened, of course, and it's been the norm for a long time -- no longer do you see boxes with 'Super CD-ROM Graphics!!!' splashed across them. So then: where are the DVD games, eh eh eh?

Anyway: I am so far interested in how the game's story seems to be evidence of a feedback loop from Japanese CRPGs, which of course are based around the game mechanics of earlier Western CRPGs. But compared to, say, "Pools of Radiance", this game plays a lot like a "Final Fantasy"-type game. You start off with a single, young protagonist (though you get to make any flavor of AD&D2E PC for this, where a J-CRPG would just hand you one) under the tutelage of an elderly master, when Disaster Strikes, and you must Flee the Village where you have spent All your Life, and then the game's master baddie shows up to stomp the both of you. (Dollars to donuts says that the master baddie actually isn't the endboss, who is a much greater evil than the master baddie is working for.) You flee, and quickly make Quirky Companions, and so on. This is like every pre-1990 Jackie Chan movie I have ever seen.

Right now I'm at a part where a bad guy is killing me repeatedly. Maybe I should have not picked a 4-HP gnome illusionist as my hero? No matter; the frequent death reminds me of the more important things I've been lining up for myself. Let's see what else I can do today.

The Diesel, I see, has embraced the strange weather by removing the wintertime battens from its roll-up front facade. I still feel the need to have some token acknowledging that these temperatures shouldn't be here: I'm wearing my corduroy sportcoat, something I wouldn't do were we having this very same weather in June.

I wasn't nervous until two people at the Sunday gaming group agreed: "That's it. We're done, we're doomed. Head for high land!" While their attitude was ha-ha-only-serious, seeing any amount of fatalism in my friends still fills me with dread. This, and the constant little reminders of the oddball atmosphere (here comes Charles in the door wearing shorts, listen to the squeak of the air conditioner at the office), has put a dint on my ability to focus on things.

Internet access at home has been squidgy for over a week now, despite Charles' efforts to make the new would-be firewall machine, the scrounged Alpha, work. Last night we went shopping at Micro Center, and I picked me up a new Netgear wireless router. Though it has its own firewall capabilities, Charles wants it sitting behind the Alpha-based one if at all paossible. If we determine that the box is simply toast, we'll fall back to using the Netgear as the house firewall instead. Tonight should hold the moment of truth.

(I played with the router's Web-based configuator a little, enough to change the admin password from the factory-default "1234" (There's a tip for all you 1337 1s) (Also: insert quote from "Spaceballs" here, if you are Carla; I'll have to tell her about this and see if this triggers her automated quote mechanisms as I predict) and make its broadcast identifier string "Chez Chestnut"... @whee)

Today, though, I'm on my way back to O'Reilly to hang out (uninvited, but I'm fairly certain I'm welcome, given my goal; see below), since Internet access is out-and-out dead at Chez Chestnut, the Alpha idling with a screenful of kernel compilation error messages until we decide what to do with this mess. Charles is sincere in his belief that we can hit a working solution tonight. I just hope we can hit one before Saturday.

The pressure to not spend this Netless afternoon reading or watching movies comes from the imperitave to Finish The Book Dammit that Erik and I received yesterday. I must spend the next week and a half in hack-and-describe mode in order for this to work according to schedule. Strange and Wondeful fact: I think I can hold up my part. I don't know how, but over the last mangle of weeks (maybe since autumn) my confidence with the project has risen a lot, and stayed there. I've managed to get a lot done, and the path ahead of me seems reasonably well-defined. I'll say no more on this, though. I know myself a little too well for that. Mmm-hmm.

I'm also making progress on the other thing I told everyone I'd put off until the move was done, and have completed the first draft of my Statement of Objects essay for my MIT application and vetted it by Jon, my principal sponsor in this crazy endeavor. He filled my head with ideas for stuff the essay still needs, so that's gotta happen today, because there's now one month left for me to finish filling this thing out. I still have to choose who to tap for writing a third recommendation letter, but after speaking with Jon yesterday I have some ideas, at last.

Finally, my first-ever contracted programming job reached feature-complete stage this week. Yay. Now comes the part where the customer tells me about all the changes they need. It's just like I read about! But in this case the customers are also my dear friends, so it's all good.