So I decided to rehabilitate this one (which is a mere 17 years old) to the point where it might be useful for Lena and/or The Boys. Lena would love to have her own computer, of course, but Amber was a little dubious when I offered her this one. It's heavy and the battery holds a charge barely long enough to carry it down a flight of stairs and plug it in again. But the wifi port works, provided you aren't too far from the hotspot. And if you're sitting by the router anyway, there's always Ethernet. 

But this machine's superpower is that it is old enough to run Gearheads  and Gubble, two of the finest all-ages action games ever made. Internet connectivity doesn't matter if you're just playing games from CD. And boy, do I have a lot of old games on CD! Which I have spent the last week trying to install and play. Installation and game controls were far from standardized in the mid-90s, so this has been quite a challenge. Some don't install, some install but won't run reliably, and some install and run fine but won't run the cut scenes (which are infrequent but crucial to games like Myst)

About half of them install and run just fine in WinXP Compatibility Mode. 

And of the ones that work, there are some gems here that Thorin and I (and in some cases even Richard) remember with great fondness. High on the list: 3D Ultra Pinball and a very classy version of Tetris (both of which will even run without a disk in the drive!). A prettily animated version of Shanghai (Mahjong solitaire). A couple of Simpsons games that I find tedious but Lena and her father (HUGE Simpsons fans) might enjoy. Icebreaker (an animated version of one of those board games that uses sets of colored plastic pyramids). Shivers 2: Harvest of Souls. a spooky adventure game that was one of my favorites. And Woodruff & and the Schnibble, one of those cute cartoony Sierra adventure games that turns out to be way too hard to play without a walkthrough. Fortunately, old Internet walkthroughs never die either, so if Lena gets interested in it she can probably play it. 

February has been a slog. Absolutely the longest 28-day month in the calendar. Up until February hit I had been at least getting out now and then to walk or cross-country ski. But then the formerly mild Minnesota winter suddenly went all Frozen Logger ("at 1000 degrees below zero / It froze my logger love"). And then, for absolutely no reason at all, my right knee went out. I wasn't doing ANYTHING except occasionally getting up from my computer to go downstairs and play phone games in the big leather chair or hiking up to the attic to watch some especially dismal specimen of Peak TV. But apparently I went up and down the stairs one time too many, and my knee started clicking and then manifesting a weird sharp pain across the top of the kneecap and I sank into the doldrums.

So I gave up on even pretending to be healthy and started working on New Years resolutions. This year's was to get the number of photos on my phone down below 1000 (starting at about 2500). This was actually kind of a fun activity, since it involved reviewing hundreds of beloved pictures of past vacations and adorable shots of my grandchildren. Last week I finally hit 999!

Then I went back to my 2020 resolution, which was one I had really thought would be easy, but somehow I didn't keep: play more computer games. See, I have a large collection of mostly vintage PC computer games, maybe 60% of which I have actually played (but not necessarily finished). Most of them won't even run on a  modern computer. But all is not lost. Steam, the Internet-based game distribution service, has been industriously remounting and remastering classic games for years now. Initially they charge rather a lot for these refitted games, but if you wait long enough they go on sale and then even more on sale and when they reach bargain bin status I impulsively buy them. So now I have not only a dusty stack of classic games in boxes looking at me reproachfully, I have a lengthening list of the same games in electronic format. So I figured it was time to tackle some of them.

First I warmed up by playing some modern story games that were on sale for as little as $.90 and don't involve anybody shooting at you (Tacoma and Oxenfree). Then I gathered my courage to take another swing at Bioshock, one of the great story-based First Person Shooters of all time. My son-in-law gave me a hard copy back in 2008, promising me that it was the next best thing to Deus Ex (my favorite game EVER). I installed it, watched the the jaw-dropping cut scenes at the beginning, and then chickened out when it came time to remember how FPS controls worked. Every few years I try again and lose my nerve. The last time I played an FPS all the way to the end was 2003, and my reflexes only get slower with each passing year. But I fired it up one more time to show Richard the beautiful introduction to Rapture (the glorious underwater city founded by Andrew Ryan, the Mad Objectivist). And since R was mildly interested, I ventured out of the underwater elevator this time and started exploring the tutorial level, with Richard helping me navigate.

Turns out that if you set the play level to Easy, it's not really that scary! Just follow the advice of the helpful guy on the other end of the 2-way radio and explore everywhere, picking up health kits and Pep bars and magical glowing syringes. Oh, and kill everyone you meet and ransack their corpses. Seems a little harsh, but civil discourse in Rapture has apparently gone seriously downhill in the last few years. And whatever you do, don't accidentally turn the play level up to Medium. That happened by accident at one point, and it was no fun at all. 

I made it through the "Welcome to Rapture Level" and I think I'm finally ready to open the door to the mad Nazi doctor's lair. Wish me luck!

 

 After I responded to lydy 's post about computer games I found myself feeling nostalgic for all that computer gaming I used to do. I went back and read through my file of notes and personal game reviews (have I mentioned that I am a compulsive documentor) and the next thing I knew I was installing Steam. I had tried it years ago and didn't like the way it bogged down my computer, but that was 10 years and 2 computers ago. Sure enough, it is much less obtrusive now. 

Installing Steam is a lot like discovering Amazon streaming video, except that with Amazon Prime some of the content is free. But even if your original intent is absolutely to stick to the free stuff, it's so tempting to just buy the whole season of Orphan Black RIGHT NOW. I originally told myself I was only installing Steam to see what was available so I could advise Lydy. Yeah, right. Next thing I knew I was downloading Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Not the cheap $4 version (it's from 1993, after all) but the new remounted full-motion sound remastered 20-year-anniversary edition. So now I'm replaying that. 

While I was browsing around on Steam I found a surprising number of old favorites still available for under $10, but didn't bite. But I did put some of them on my wishlist, just in case I ever finished GK:SOTF. Then today I got an email from my new BFF, Steam, letting me know that Under a Killing Moon was now marked down 80% (from $5.99 to $1.99) limited time only! Not only that, for $5.99 I could get a 5-pack of Tex Murphy games, including two that I have never played and one that I really liked but could not finish because the computer I was using back in 1998 was too underpowered to handle it. Zow!  So okay, now I own those. And I seem to be logged into Steam again, looking for more things to put on my wishlist.