Random Thoughts from the Weary Traveller
Mar. 2nd, 2005 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuThe lovely and talented ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
snippy and I are back from our coast-to-coast vacation trip. Got in the door half an hour ago to find the Tivo swollen unto bursting with watchable goodies. Ahhh, it's good to be home. Of course, the refrigerator is mostly empty. But you can't have everything, I guess.
My family is unchanged, aside from being about a year and a half older all around. My youngest niece, a mere babe in arms last time I saw her, was walking and talking and very cute.
Virginia and D.C., for places that are unbearably humid in the summer, were amazingly dry on this trip--despite large amounts of frozen water falling out of they sky several time while we were there. Snippy and I went thru a huge amount of bottled water on our trip, and still always felt like we were coming down with a cold or a sore throat because our mouths were dry.
As I sat squeezed into my seat on the plane trip to Virginia, I wondered why the airlines insisted on squeezing so many seats into a row. Why don't they make them just a little wider and charge more for them? Then it occurred to me that they do. They call it First Class. And I'm not willing to pay the premium involved. Drat.
From high in the air some urban areas--especially in the midwest, where they're most sharply deliniated--resemble illuminated microchips. There's a great deal of organization involved, though most of it is invisible, only hinted at by the arrays of lights.
The old college friends (and gaming buddies) I visited have turned me on to Freedom Force, a superhero computer game. So I went online at the hotel the other night and ordered a copy via Amazon. $13 including shipping! (Yeah, it's an older game--but so what? It looks like fun, and I'll enjoy it. Doesn't have to be cutting edge.)
Driving in the DC Metro area is as frustrating and painful an experience as ever. The new Woodrow Wilson bridge on the beltway is still not done. I can't imagine that it could take so long.
My lovely and talented wife was more comfortable with both my family and my friends--they weren't total strangers to her on this trip. That always helps. She marveled at the number of churches to be seen everywhere.
The four hour drive from the DC area to Brookneal (and back again) is very different from driving in Oregon. Rolling hills and roads--including highways--that twist back and forth like a snake, frequently at the same time. Getting stuck behind slow moving log trucks or farm trucks is infuriating. No doubt it helped sculpt my psyche in my formative years (that constant simmer of anger just below the surface had to come from somewhere....)
snippy and I are back from our coast-to-coast vacation trip. Got in the door half an hour ago to find the Tivo swollen unto bursting with watchable goodies. Ahhh, it's good to be home. Of course, the refrigerator is mostly empty. But you can't have everything, I guess.My family is unchanged, aside from being about a year and a half older all around. My youngest niece, a mere babe in arms last time I saw her, was walking and talking and very cute.
Virginia and D.C., for places that are unbearably humid in the summer, were amazingly dry on this trip--despite large amounts of frozen water falling out of they sky several time while we were there. Snippy and I went thru a huge amount of bottled water on our trip, and still always felt like we were coming down with a cold or a sore throat because our mouths were dry.
As I sat squeezed into my seat on the plane trip to Virginia, I wondered why the airlines insisted on squeezing so many seats into a row. Why don't they make them just a little wider and charge more for them? Then it occurred to me that they do. They call it First Class. And I'm not willing to pay the premium involved. Drat.
From high in the air some urban areas--especially in the midwest, where they're most sharply deliniated--resemble illuminated microchips. There's a great deal of organization involved, though most of it is invisible, only hinted at by the arrays of lights.
The old college friends (and gaming buddies) I visited have turned me on to Freedom Force, a superhero computer game. So I went online at the hotel the other night and ordered a copy via Amazon. $13 including shipping! (Yeah, it's an older game--but so what? It looks like fun, and I'll enjoy it. Doesn't have to be cutting edge.)
Driving in the DC Metro area is as frustrating and painful an experience as ever. The new Woodrow Wilson bridge on the beltway is still not done. I can't imagine that it could take so long.
My lovely and talented wife was more comfortable with both my family and my friends--they weren't total strangers to her on this trip. That always helps. She marveled at the number of churches to be seen everywhere.
The four hour drive from the DC area to Brookneal (and back again) is very different from driving in Oregon. Rolling hills and roads--including highways--that twist back and forth like a snake, frequently at the same time. Getting stuck behind slow moving log trucks or farm trucks is infuriating. No doubt it helped sculpt my psyche in my formative years (that constant simmer of anger just below the surface had to come from somewhere....)
So...
Date: 2005-03-03 04:16 pm (UTC)Re: So...
Date: 2005-03-03 07:52 pm (UTC)There's a campaign game, but you can also download a map editor and create new maps. You can download literally hundreds and hundreds of skins and meshes (and voices) for characters from DC, Marvel, tv and movies. You can also design new characters (though you have use existing skins for them unless you're prepared to create new ones yourself with Photoshop or Gimp or something similar). If you design characters for multi-player environments, you have limits on how many points you can spent on character attributes, stats and powers. If you're playing solo on your own PC, you can ignore all such point cost concerns and go bananas. When designing characters, including their powers, you can choose from a variety of animations to decide how the power looks (including Zap! Pow! "sound effects" if you like) in use.
When actually playing the game, you can either pause it or greatly slow it down while you instruct your characters (right click on a target and you'll get a menu of available options, including movement ("move here", "fly here") and your attacks). You can cause the camera to zoom in, zoom out, swoop around, swoop up overhead or give you a ground-level view. It takes a little practice (I got my butt kicked playing the game a couple of times while fumbling with the controls).
My friends have huge stables of character meshes and do most of their playing in the game single-player, which is what I'm probably going to wind up doing likewise. It was certainly entertaining while I was there visiting.