Musings on the games on my new system

[vsp]

Well, I've had my Athlon 1300 for about a week now, and as most of you could have predicted, it's been getting quite a gaming workout. (Having clunked along with a P-133 for the last six years, which was a P-75 until a year ago, I've been a bit out of touch with PC gaming.)

Loaded so far:

* MAME. (Of course.) If you've heard of it, you probably have it already; if you haven't, and you've dropped a quarter into ANY arcade game in your life, go to www.mame.net (then to www.mame.dk for the ROMs) and start downloading.

The only catch is that I stopped collecting & burning ROMs at my previous job around .36 beta 16, so I have about a thousand ROM sets of varying ages to download or update to have a complete set. That's only, oh, a gig or two of 56k downloading time...

* Visual Pinball and VPinMAME. Now THIS is the bee's knees. Take a rather nifty pinball-table-editor program, add on the ability to incorporate scanned playfields and parts of real machines, then add in VPinMAME to allow these tables to use the real tables' rulesets, sounds and functions. Surprisingly realistic, and that's from someone who has a FunHouse pinball six feet from where he's typing this.

* A handful of other emulators for console game systems (Magic Engine (registered) for the TurboGrafx, NESticle for the Nintendo, ZSNES for the Super Nintendo, Genecyst for the Sega Genesis, Stella & PCAE for the Atari 2600). You know the drill.

* American McGee's Alice. The wife is actually playing this more than I am right now, but I am finding it entertaining. Alice is back in Wonderland, at least in her own warped mind; in reality, she's institutionalized and duelling the Red Queen and her minions for any hope of maintaining her sanity. End result -> think Quake 3 with VERY snazzy graphics and a great concept for a theme.

* Soldier of Fortune. This came bundled with my video card. The novelty factor comes mainly from the game's hit engine, which has 26 different "hit zones" on each enemy that can take damage or be blown to smithereens (depending on what weapon's just hit it.) When the FIRST attack I made in the game blew a skinhead thug's right arm six feet from the rest of his body, I knew I was in for quality entertainment. Decent level design, too, for when the blood fetish wears off.

* Thief: The Dark Project. Then we have the anti-Quake. This is one I'd been promising myself for a while, and I sense I'm going to be waaaaaaaaaaay too addicted to it (I got its sequel as well, but I want to beat the original before I install the second). A very intense simulation of medieval breaking-and-entering, with a witty protagonist with some nifty toys (like Water Arrows for putting out hallway torches to provide some darkness for hiding). Not for the impatient or the instant-gratification Quake crowd, but it's in my CD-drive now.

* The Sims. Found it for $19.95 preowned at EB Gameworld and grabbed it to see what all the fuss was about. I toyed around with a couple of basic creations for an hour or so, and probably will go back to it some night this week, but I have a feeling I'll have the same problem with this that I had with the Creatures series. I marvel at the complexity of the game engine, and the number of things the characters can do, but simulating living creatures and their thought patterns is so difficult that even the best simulations end up feeling simplistic after a while.

On my to-do list: Black & White (for when I find myself with, oh, a spare month or two to really get into it), Serious Sam (state-of-the-art bang-bang), and any suggestions from the peanut gallery. Like...

jeff. That would be your cue.