Jacob's Insidious Ramblings

I just dug out a game I have not played in years because I am going to try and make it to a LAN party next weekend(I think). The game I am referring to is called Quake. Yes, it is rather old but the name was tossed around as a potential game to be played so I wanted to make sure I had it ready to work on my laptop, which I would be bringing, instead of my desktop. I recently got Windows 7 Professional installed on my desktop. It runs 32bit and my laptop runs 7 Ultimate in 64bit. I really doubt there will be much of any difference between the two in terms of playability. My recent games like Team Fortress 2 and slightly older ones like Freedom Force works fine on my laptop. Even Tron 2.0 from some years ago works great on my laptop.

Anyway, back to Quake. It installed fine using the installer that came with my original CD. I tried to get it running using GLQuake with no luck every which way I reconfigured the compatibility settings. Eventually after some digging I found ‘Fitzquake’. Since the source code for Quake was released some time back people have taken it upon themselves to update the code and make it playable on newer machines. After using that executable it started just fine. I was even able to pump the resolution to 1920×1080(1080p) which is HDTV standards. The game does look like crap now days compared to these new fangled ones but man, does Quake run fast as hell. Of course the reason it looks like crap is that the textures and overall technology running it is mostly from around the DOS era days before and just after the start of 3D accelerators. I played a few levels before I saved it and quit. I was a little surprised that I still remembered those levels pretty well. I would like to try multiplayer co-op one day just for fun. One of my oldest friends and I beat the game together many, many years ago.

I downloaded the Demo for ‘Batman: Arkham Asylum’ and just got done playing a good 30 minutes or so worth. I can honestly say I like what I see so far. What makes it even sweeter is that the voices of Batman, Joker, Harley Quinn, and many others are voiced by the ‘Batman: The Animated Series’ actors. That means that one of the best voices for Joker, Mark Hamill, is doing the Joker voice. Anyway, like I said, you should try out the demo and see if it is your cup of tea. If I had the 50 bucks I would purchase it for my PC. I will have to be happy with the demo for now and I bet the same will be true when it is released toward the end of August.

I got the game Ghostbusters on my computer for Father’s Day. I am enjoying it a lot. It has a lot of fun parts so far and is getting harder to stay alive. I do have a few nitpicks about it though. One is the save ‘feature’. It goes by checkpoints, which I find kinda irritating. I had to refight a few things due to this feature. There is also no multiplayer mode on the PC release. The missing multiplayer part does not really bother me so much as it quite a bit of fun on the single player mode. I almost did not get it installed as it almost would finish installing then the installer would crap out. I ended up finding where it was ‘installed’ and created a shortcut on my desktop for the game executable. Most games now days have a few weird wrinkles bug wise. I figure, and hope, that they fix some of the more glaring glitches that have come up and tweak it a bit more. This game honestly makes me think back to when I watched the first GB movie and wanted to be a Ghostbuster. It would be badass now too but almost dying often enough would kinda get old after a while.