What the HELL?!

Well, sudden change in the weather here today. A high of 99 degrees. Welcome to Kansas 😉

We have no kitchen cabnets. Instead we have a table completely covered with the contents of the kitchen cabnets and the kitchen counters. It’s a bit of an eyesore, but tonight I’ll get the first couple of sections of cabnets up, and I’ll work again on it Wednsday. Tuesday, unluckly, I won’t be able to – no heavy straining for 24 hours after I get that second set of teeth pulled. Ug. Hopefully I can get a shitload done tonight to make up for the time I’m gonna loose.

We also ended up buying new toys – a new cordless drill and saw combo pack. Unluckly, it’s not quite as powerful as I had hoped, but, I’ll make use of it in a number of places (this thing will rock for jobs like trim board, etc.)

Found some new utilities for making old games run under Windows 2000. Unluckly, I STILL can’t get Under A Killing Moon or Pandora Principle to run (Under A Killing Moon in my opinion is one of the greatest games ever written, even if it isn’t that much more than a very long interactive movie. Great sense of humor about the game, James Earl Jones as the voice of the Great Detective in The Sky, and a seriously long gameplay time. No one else has ever managed to get it right after that.) I did get Terminator: Future Shock to run (another good game – kinda interesting when the game begins cheating and sending units through time at ya), and might get a couple other older favorites to run. I need to build a machine one of these days JUST for some of the older games, but, I still don’t have enough hardware (one machine is being slowly build for another snort / firewalling machine, the other is going to be a media server – MP3’s we rip from CD, etc.)

Playing alot of the older games that are so excellent really gets me to thinking – could it be done again? Unluckly, I don’t think that the current game market or technology could support another Under A Killing Moon style game. UAKM is game three in the Tex Murphy series – it was 4 CD’s long (and they pulled alot of tricks to get it fit on 4), Pandora Principle is 6 CD’s (game 4), and Overseer (game 5, the last) is either 7 or 8 (and there’ sa DVD only version) HUGE games that had incredible production costs. The tech used wouldn’t work on modern machines to start with – low res images and blue screening works just fine together. With modern higher res stuff, well, it would look very unrealistic. So most of the stuff would have to be rendered on the fly – which sucks, since motion capture still produces stiff looking characters (I haven’t figured out WHY that is that case – there’s subtle information that’s lost in motion capture, but WHAT?) Pandora had a fairly large number of different characters involved – that right there would mean some seriously large art budgets. Then there are all the ‘sets’ in the game (again, a huge art budget – I’m not sure how many sets there are, but it’s a really large game)

I’d love to see another Tex Murphy game – too bad Microsoft bought Access Software out, and the game series is dead and gone now. They talked about doing another one for a while, but, the return on investment is too low. Too bad.