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July 3, 2005
Media Weekend: Carmageddon and Cyberpunk
geekage, life
My mind tells me it's well past time for another blog entry. An outpouring of information is needed, for the well balanced sanity of my essence. And so I finish up my game of Carmageddon II and happily head for the text editor.
Having discovered OpenGLide, I recently dug up my copy of Carmageddon II to rediscover that it is quite the nifty game. It runs relatively well in classic using OpenGLide, the only problem I've encountered being that the blasted music doesn't want to play, although iTunes can remedy that rather easily. Although I can't find anyone else reporting this problem, I can only assume that it's something simple like OSX hiding the Audio CD portion of the game's disc from Classic somehow. Other than this, though, it's quite the enjoyable game.
It's interesting, however, how quickly it's community has declined. Having been released in 1999, just a year before my G4 came off of the presses, a vast majority of the fan sites centered around it have already either dissapeared outright or sunken into stagnation. And the official website appears to have followed the fansites into the darkness. It's quite strange to compare this to the ongoing popularity of Diablo II or even Starcraft, which, despite it's 7 years of age, still holds gamers in it's delightful claws and is even favored by the great gods with updates.
The stagnation of Carmageddon 2's internet appearance makes it seem markedly older than other games, making it age before it's time while the more favored of it's kin enjoy their player-granted extended youth.
Recently I've been on something of a William Gibson kick, although more by happenstance than any logical decision. He's quite the master storyteller, and I've extremely enjoyed most of his books, although his evidentally more mainstream novel "Pattern Recognization" seems a bit less coherent than the rest of his books. For one, it's a bit trendy; all of the computers in the book are Macs, and although I love Apple, it's a bit strange that everyone is so obviously using Macintosh computers. The main character is also a disciple of Pilates, a fact which seems to have little importance as anything other than a novelty, despite being repeatedly brought up. In general, the story as a whole dosen't seem to fit together quite as well as his others do, looking more like a collection of somewhat interesting aspects taped onto a rather sturdy storyline than his usual streamlined works.
Perhaps part of the reason for this is that, unlike most of his work, "Pattern Recognition" is set more or less in the present. At any rate, it doesn't hold together for me nearly as well as I expect his stories to, and although it did certainly hold my attention to the end, the world which was barely departed from our own somehow seemed less real than those which Gibson usually paints. Perhaps this is more of a flaw – if it can be called that – in my own mind than in the novel, however.
Anyway, it's back to the media pump for me; perhaps a spot of music and a tasting of WarCraft III. The lack of uncanned emotion tugs a bit at my soul, despite my attempts to drown it in media and hope.
Posted by Trevor Savage at July 3, 2005 5:54 PM