barely fatal

I’ve used to play video games for a little more then 18 years now. It all started when a friend of mine showed me his C64 and his games. I think it was Bubble Bobble that got me hooked. It took many years before I could afford my first PC, but long before that I blocked my dad’s 286er and later his 486DX2 66. They had all the popular game magazines in the school library and I read them all.

I’ve been a subscriber of Germany’s biggest PC gaming mag since 1997, but my collection also contains a copy from 1995 (Powerplay). Yesterday I found it in a box in the basement. It’s a fascinating read.

Bill Gates talks about the bright future online games will have once the latency and bandwidth problems of the internet were solved. He talks about the brand-new DirectX and how it will revolutionize gaming in Windows with all the fancy new gaming hardware like 3dfx cards. He says that the PC will always keep its niche alongside the consoles and that there won’t be a winner or loser in the PC/consoles war simply because the PC offers so many more possibilities. Whilst the last bit slowly begins to change Gates was right on almost all accounts.

The big previews and tests in that edition of the mag are about Bioforge, Dark Forces, Z and X-Com: Terror From The Deep. The first Pentiums are blasting the 486ers away and 2Mb graphic cards are the way to go. The help section explains how to load your himem.sys and what you have to do to make your no-name sound card behave like a Soundblaster 16. People discussed whether Novell DOS was better than MS DOS. 800×600 (Super-VGA!) was high-end and Tia Carrere starred in The Daedalus Encounter. Oh, and people are waiting for Prey – which was finally released in 2006, by the way. Everybody plays Duke Nukem 3D (It’s so violent! Ban it!) and Quake is soon to be released, supposedly with much better graphics than the Duke has.

Reading all that was like a trip to the past, and to my childhood. I miss the excitement, the experiments, and the simplicity of the games. I certainly don’t miss the hardware prices or the config.sys. I still have my 3dfx card. Anyone …?

Company barbecue on Friday, great weather, not too cold, and even more colleagues than last year. Babies, kids, as well as partners. Finally you can put face on all the names that you hear about every day at work. Fun!

We had a party last night. My father turned 60 last week and he has a lot of friends and family. It was a lot of fun actually, and the food (italian BBQ) was great. My father said he likes the New York photo I gave him, now he only needs a decent place on a wall. He also enjoys his GPS navigation system, even though he continues to insist that he doesn’t need it. He likes his toys like every man after all.

I started playing Bioshock. Now that’s a game that lives up to its hype. I’m not very far yet, so I can’t give a final verdict, but so far it’s a blast.

Strange atmosphere in the supermarket: Cop cars patrol the entrance area and three bald gorillas in suits watch over the dairy products and toiletries. One of them talks on his mobile, “We’re in Düsseldorf, it’s all quiet here.”

Should I have feared for my life? Or was it just viral marketing? If yes, then it worked: I picked up V for Vendetta on my way out.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith, also known as “the DVD you better don’t watch on your Windows PC”, starts out interesting, stylish and clever. Then it gets worse and worse, and eventually it turns into a shoot ‘em up video game – minus the interactivity. It’s a waste.

Fortunately, Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica lives up to its promise: I enjoyed every single show. Of course it ended with a cliff hanger, and of course I have to get the third season in September. The problem is, because it has not yet been aired in Germany you can’t buy it. They’ll show it on pay-TV in November and maybe, maybe then it will be released on DVD. So I’ll have to get the imported UK version. Not so bad, I watch the original language version anyway, but it’s gonna be quite expensive. Bleh!

Actually I wanted to upgrade my PC – well, replace it with a new one – but now I have decided to wait a little while longer. Intel announced the new 45nm Penryn core CPUs and Nvidia’s next generation of GPUs is expected to be released in November. Also in November all the fancy new games will be released: Crysis, Assassin’s Creed, Call Of Duty 4 … and more. It’s too bad that I can’t play Bioshock before, but I can live with that. So November it is.

Next month the new KT Tunstall album comes out. Have you heard of her? Check her out, it’s really worth it.