Sunday, July 16, 2006

Pretty boring day today. I was supposed to go for a bike ride with Sean Collison, but he never gave me a call. I ammused myself by watching reviews for really terrible computer games on gamestop.com. Pretty ammusing stuff. One game (the worst rated of all time) called Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was amazing.

Big Rigs is a game so astoundingly bad that it manages to transcend nearly every boundary put forth by some of gaming's absolute worst of the worst and easily makes it into that dubiously extraordinary category of being one of the most atrocious games ever published.

The basic idea in the actual game is that you pick one from four vaguely different trucks and then one from five vaguely different levels. You then compete against another truck in a simple checkpoint race. That's it. However, Big Rigs can't even get this basic concept right. The supposedly computer-controlled truck you're supposed to be racing against in the game never actually moves. It's right there next to you at the beginning of a race, but it has no purpose in the game. This is to say, actually, that none of the game's races have a purpose because there's no competition and no time limit. You win every single time. So unless you especially like seeing a winning-screen over and over again that reads "You're Winner!", there is absolutely no point in playing Big Rigs.

But let's assume for a moment that the AI trucks actually worked, and you could get a race going. Even if this were the case, the game still wouldn't be worth playing in the slightest. Big Rigs' controls essentially involve hitting the arrow keys of the keyboard in the desired direction and nothing more. The game provides no support for peripheral controllers of any kind, and there isn't even an option to edit the default keyboard controls in any manner. Your truck also handles pretty horribly. There are no physics here. You accelerate much too quickly to even be minutely realistic (especially when going in reverse, which lets you go from around 0 to 60mph in about five seconds, continue accelerating infinitely faster, and stop on a dime the second you let up on the keyboard), you can travel over the most rugged of terrain without any problems (including nearly vertical mountains), and you can turn in ways that cause you to jerk around in some pretty ridiculous manners.

Of course, the controls would only matter if you actually had to worry about running into things or crashing your truck, which, actually, is a nonissue. You see, you can clip your truck right through every object on a race course in Big Rigs, from the biggest of houses and walls, right down to the smallest of lampposts. Furthermore, bridges evidently don't actually exist, despite the fact that you can see them--driving over any of them results in you sinking right through them. It is also quite possible to simply drive right off of the literal end of a level when playing. Considering the fact that you can drive over these tall, seemingly insurmountable mountains (at least, insurmountable for an actual diesel-powered truck), and there are no level boundaries, eventually you can just drive off into literal nothingness and can hang out there as long as you please.

Real high quality game, I tell you.

On the other hand (you have more fingers) I'm looking forward to Midieval Total War 2 coming out in November. The games are awesome, lots of strategy, tactics actually matter, the units aren't all carbon copies of eachother... bueno. One thing this game added that previous Total War games lacked is that individual units duke it out instead of just squads of units. They're still controled as a group, but when one guy stabs another guy in the chest with a sword, he actually takes it in the chest with a sword; he doesn't just fall over dead.

I went for a run today too. Mile and a half. I forgot to set a stopwatch, so I have no idea how long it took me, but probably longer than I can brag about.

Brother's wedding is coming up in a hurry. It'll be an event seeing the whole family. I heard my cousin Rob has a girlfriend now. Pretty crazy. I remember pushing him and Cindy around in a pipe-works cart at Gran's house. I feel old now. Bloody hell.

I was poking around online and came across the Lockeed Martin website. They recently christened the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter the "Lightning" as a throwback to the P-38. Its a pretty cool airplane. Thrust vectoring, VTOL, stealth, super-cruise... *technological orgasm* Good stuff.

My buddy Devin isn't doing so well. He's not getting along well with his dad, and isn't very happy. He's kind of in a tough spot because he's not happy where he is, but he hasn't opened any other avenues for his life. He didn't do very well at WSU, and is currently taking classes at a community college. And he needs a girlfriend.

Anyway, I'm tired and need a shower, so I'm going to bail.