The Before Supper Edition

Wow! Look at this! A post coming to you LIVE before 6PM!

I think I want to go out for a late walk tonight, so to make sure I have nothing in the way of taking a stroll and going to bed, I've already done a sketch a now I'm doing this. I'll still have to make a lunch, however.

A fairly uneventful week went by... Nothing spectacular got accomplished. Which in and of itself may be an issue - I should have gotten something done for applying to school. But I didn't, and now I'm going to try and do it over the week. Mind you, at the end of this week is Valentine's Day (boo) and then we get Monday off for Family Day (yay). So with an extra day hopefully I can do something semi-productive. In my defense, however, I did try to phone BC Med and cancel my insurance so I could switch over to the Alberta variety. But silly me, ain't no government offices open on weekends.

Okay, many years ago I desperately wanted a joystick. Very very badly. I got X-Wing Alliance, and it needed a controller (unlike TIE Fighter, which let you use the mouse). In my family, we got one of three things for our birthday. We get a gift from our parents, $40, or a birthday party. And considering we never got allowance, our birthday was perhaps the largest potential source of income we'd get for the next 365 days. I had a problem, however. You see, the joystick I wanted, the Logitech Wingman Extreme (throttle control AND A Z-AXIS!) was around the $85 mark. Factor in any potential monies from grandparents... And I was still way out of luck.

So I devised a plan. I decided to have a party, and invited about 5-7 friends. I then proceeded to specifically tell them to give me money as a present. The polite thing to do? Nope. Tactful? Not at all. But I wanted that joystick, dammit, and at $10-$20 a head I was good as gold. If I recall correctly (this was a very long time ago, when Super Smash Bros was still a new and exciting game) I bagged about $110. Score!

The following weekend I went out to downtown Vancouver with my older sister and her friend (later to be husband) to do some shopping. I did indeed get my Wingman Extreme at a Futureshop. Just for kicks we later checked out an EB Games - keep in mind, this was back when they still cared about PC Gaming. And in the corner I found a gem - Jane's World War 2 Fighters. I mean, I liked WWII aircraft anyways and I'd puttered around on Microsoft Flight Sim and Secret Weapons of the Lufftwaffe (or Luft-waffle as I called it) a few times before. But... it was $11.50. That was, like, more than 10% of my haul. I decided to go for it (and promptly forfeit the equivalent of a summer's-worth of slushies), and brought it home and stuck it on a shelf.

Where it stayed for a few months until I beat X-Wing Alliance and went "Oh yeah...". So I gave it a spin and was immediately hooked. I loved the routine of taking off, the immersion of being able to look around inside the cocpit, and the trilling dogfights. The ping ping of getting hit by oncoming fire, the long plumes of smoke from damaged craft, and the fiery blossom as a plane's altitude tried to go below 0 feet. I played that game ragged, knew all the aircraft and how to fly them.

It's a shame that game hasn't quite stood the test of time - When I load it up now I'm treated to all sorts of bizarre bugs and texture issues and input problems. I've tried a few other games here and there - Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator lacked that level of polish and excitement, and Secret Weapons over Normandy was pure arcade trash. What's the point of a combat flight sim that doesn't let you stall? Anyways, when the Christmas/holidays sale came up on Steam, I finally decided to throw down $10 for IL-Sturmovik 1946. It too is an older game, but I've read time and again that it is the very best for the WWII combat simulator genre. I figured since it was up on Steam that it should run under modern OS environments. And surely enough it does - the supported resolutions are small and need to be directly edited in a config file to support my native display, and I needed to tweak the sound settings to that it would use both speakers at once.

It's similar to World War 2 Fighters - there's flaps, landing gear, engine settings, and a host of other features or nuances I'd become familiar with. But then it adds historically accurate bomb sites, chalk removal, torque drift, lockable tail wheels, pitch adjust, etc etc. Worst of all, where Jane's came with a large folded up card with keyboard mapping, the Steam version of Sturmovik obviously does not. I find myself going to the controls menu very frequently to figure out what I'm trying to do. The game seems to kick it up a notch it regards to accuracy and simulation. Everything is a little bit more difficult than I remember Janes treating me. But I'm slowly getting the hang of it. Although this time I'm using a gamepad rather than my trusty Wingman Extreme. My joystick is still back at home, and I'm not even sure if I have room for it here. Oh well, I'll survive one dogfight at a time...


In other news, Battlestar Galactica has absolutely ROCKED the past two weeks. I can't believe how totally exciting it is to watch. And they've killed so many characters along the way... Zarach was always a scumbag and I'm glad to see him go (I can't believe he executed the council), but I always liked Gaeta. Sure, he was a prick since he decided to do this coupe thing and I wanted to see him get smacked around a bit. Executed though? That was harsh. His last summer with Gias really touched me. He's at the end of his road and talking about his dreams... How heartbreaking. That fact that his leg stops bothering him right before the execution just twists the dagger.

I guess it kinda sucks that they hand to end the character there, he was with the show since the beginning and it's rough to see him dropped like that. That, and I kinda wish his little revolt would have worked a bit, at least to the extent that Starbuck would have gotten smacked around a bit. I never really liked her, I hope the character gets knocked down a peg before the end of the series.

Annnd, that's about it for now. I still need to make lunch for tomorrow and sync up the iPod. Oh, and a new Sparks is up.
-Cril

I stood on the floor of the Monument Valley
Sky deep with stars
And I asked "are you safe from the thieves in this country"?
I hope that you are
Sanitized souls, did you airbrush out your roles?
I can't help but ask
I used to be young with a strong constitution
Just look at me now

Every broadcast disaster just adds a new wrinkle
But that just don't fly with me
That just don't fly

The Posies - That Don't Fly