Time Passes Slowly …

I am now about a solid week with the new machine, which I am considering dubbing François.

LOTRO looks great, obviously, though it lags out worse than the older computers. I'm assuming it is because I have yet to perform the gauntlet of stutter-troubleshooting exercises. It looks beautiful and gets good frame-rates, though. I actually sighed out loud like a comely wench when I first went traipsing about the Shire. OK, that's pushing it, but there was a lot of IRL Wizard's Fire involved, so my memory is a little hazy.

I no longer have to put up with the indoor lag of Fallout 3 - Rejoice! The outdoor areas were fine on the Nvidia 8600 G, but the indoor areas were sometimes a nightmare to get through. But no longer. The sad news about Fallout 3 is that I lost my saved games and have had to start over from the beginning. Oh well!

This time I'm going with an evil guy and focusing on Stealth and Science. I want to try out a character who is not focused on combat to see what challenges arise. But after annihilating the entire Springvale School gang with my 10mm pistol shortly upon leaving Vault 101, I can see the challenges may be few on the Normal setting. I think a bump up on the difficulty level is in order.

In case it wasn't inferred from the lack of rants about gaming on linux, I decided to go with Vista 64-bit over a linux distribution (though I was eyeing Fluxbuntu). It just makes sense for me right now, which I find rather sad in way. The ability to just get up and running with apps like Creative Suite and Steam without compatability layers or virtual machines made up my mind. Well, that and the joy of MSDN academic licensing. You can trust I am too skinflint enough to even pay $99 for an OS, and I would rather spend five months making Steam and Fallout 3 work together in CrossOver than that. But I got an easy way out so I took it.

I also decided to install good 'ol DOSBox. I loaded up a high school favorite and spent a little time reminscing about being a nerd. I can see myself having a lot of non-game related fun with DOSBox as well. But I am a weirdo that would be amped about using WordPerfect 4.2 to type fart jokes.