Sunday, December 27, 2009

Happy Post-Christmas !

    Here's hoping your Christmas get-together was fantabulous and that Santa brought you what you wished for. .


     He brought me a bunch of good books for 2010, as well as several PS3 games. We put in a PlayStation 3 console last Spring when we got the wide-screen TV, but so far, it's only been used to watch movies. I've tried the PS3 gamepad a couple times, but trying to remember which of 25 buttons does what while a horde of evil monsters are charging at you is sheer suicide. However, Santa also wisely brought me some non-hack-&-slash PS3 games (golf, Civilization, etc.) so I can get used to these buttons at a reasonable pace. I don't think Tiger Woods is going to attack me if I take too much time hitting my tee shot.

  . Santa also brought me a new PC. With a "Quad Core", or something like that. All I know is that it's super-fast and has lots of hard-drive space. It will be a learning experience - it has Windoze-7 and Microsoft Office 2007 on it. My company's IS Department is gradually converting everyone over to these, amidst much whining about "things being so different". I've avoided it so far, so this will be a good way to get acclimated to these programs, before making the switch at the office.

   . Best of all, the new 'puter means I can finally play Heroes Of Might & Magic 5. I've had this game, and the Expansion Pack shown above, for three years now. But my older PC was simply too slow for it. So it's been collecting dust on my shelf since 2006. Yesterday was devoted completely to the first campaign and the Random Map generator in HOMM-5.

   . FWIW, I still believe HOMM-3 is the best PC game ever. Its random map generator allows for infinite replay value, and it's nice, after a stressful day at the office, to come home and conquer a world, killing everyone and everything that doesn't acknowledge me as just the wonderfulest tyrant to ever come along. I've kept an old PC with Windoze-98 on it just for that game, because Windoze-XP wouldn't run it. Now there is a rumor that HOMM-3 will run on Windoze-7. Stay tuned.

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