One asks oneself. For you see, said game, (in this case Recettear) does not run on my platform of choice (that being the Mac). Well, I've paid for a fair share of games in my time and I've pirated a fair share of games in my time but how does one pay for a game if one does not know if it will reliably run? So I downloaded it and tried it in WINE. I didn't get sound, and it ran okay, though with a few error messages. And then it crashed. So obviously I was not going to play it that way. So I tried it on one of the systems I would like to sell, and again, it ran, sorta, but the whole thing felt really, really bogged down. And it's not a really complex game either. Then I pulled out a video card from my "box o' cards" and put it in. It ran a little better, but the screen was all distorted! aarg! So then Mizzy gave me her old PC laptop which was newer, so I thought I would try it on that. It ran great, up until the first dungeon, and then it felt like slogging through really deep mud. Super! So then I put the original PC back, and got out my newest AGP video card, and put that in. Well, finally at least somewhat decent performance. The game play area is not really that big, I shouldn't need a 128MB video card to keep track of it all. But, oh well. In any case, I was finally able to play it without crashing and at somewhat approaching a normal speed, and it's... decent. 

 

It's about a girl who gets stuck with a bunch of debt when her father takes out a loan to go "adventuring" and how she pays it back to the fairy named Tear who comes knocking. By opening an item shop! So you get to be behind the counter for once, and the adventurers come to you. Of course, it's greater profits to tag along with one and grab up the items he finds, so you can do that too. An interesting concept. The art is great, the voices are Japanese (thank you very much) and the translation is both funny as itself, but also when the fairy says things like "press the down button to do this" and the girl is like, "eh, what's a down button?" and she replies "just try to follow along and not worry too much." 

 

And now that I've gone on for two paragraphs about something you care nothing about;

 

The weekend went fine. Just the one on saturday, which was a total waste of time. Then the game thing part of the day, then Sean called me at... 1:00ish I believe, so we went over and painted trim in his old house. It was painted this, kind of nice, I thought, aqua color, and he was going over it with white. Let's say this: Sean might be a better artist then I am, but I am clearly the superior house painter. I guess because I was taught by the best: my grandma! (my mother is snorting aloud as she read this) And as only part of the aqua was taken off, it'll need at least another coat. Personally, I would have with another color and not white, or stripped it down and left it... wood colored, but it's not my house and I wasn't asked. His house has these sort of, decorative, edges around the doorframes, and along the floor, and things, that's what I mean by trim. More then most houses, they went overboard on it.

 

Then we watched a throughly ridiculous movie, Machete, with the psudo-naked Jessica Alba shower scene for all of 5 seconds. Then we tried playing some firefight, but it was lagging all over the place. Lag+sniping=sadface. Having a bullet leave your weapon a half second after you've pulled the trigger may not seem like a huge difference, but if you think that, you've never had a suicidal grunt running at you with two active grenades. Because suddenly he's HERE rather then THERE and that's it for you! So that didn't work out too good. He called TW but didn't get too far. It was, at that point, like 10:00 on a saturday night, so I'm not surprised. 

 

Then today I played Recettear a bit, cleaned a bit, finished Zero Sum Game, answered calls. I have two booked for tomorrow, so the week is looking pretty sparse. Also found a new blog, done by a guy who's playing every NES game, in alphabetical order, to try and understand life through video games. He's a very good writer, so I've been reading that a bit too today.