Tea Leaves

Snippets from a real conversation I had this weekend with my friend Nat:

Me: “Hey, you remember that game Exult, the re-implementation of Ultima VII?

Nat: “Sure I do.”

Me: “I’ve been not playing it quite a bit lately. I grabbed the sources from CVS and built it so that I could have a Universal binary to be not playing.”

Nat: “Did it build easily?”

Me: “It wasn’t too bad. There were some hidden dependencies that I needed to tease out. I probably spent maybe a half or or so getting the thing built, which isn’t that bad for something that I spend so much time not playing. And I didn’t like the idea of not playing the PPC version on my Intel box.”

Nat: “Huh.”

Me: “The most interesting thing is that there’s a concurrency bug in the midi thread. I spent about an hour debugging it and sent in a patch, so that the fan doesn’t spin up and the CPU doesn’t get hot when I’m not playing. I hate not playing games that make the fan spin up. They’re so loud, y’know?”

Nat: “You realize that this is the logical conclusion of “I like installing games more than playing them.”

Me: “Yeah, I know. I just really like not playing the Ultima games, though. There are so many of them that they really give a lot of bang for the buck. Not all of them, though — I tried not playing Ultima VI and it didn’t really grab me. Martian Dreams is great, though. I’ve also been not playing Flight Simulator, but that’s just a one-off.”

Summary: What the hell is wrong with me?

Additional Resources

• More on my obsession with Ultima.
• If you’re only going to play one Ultima game, play this one.
• In the course of our further discussion, Nat and I discovered Blogging Ultima. Sometimes reading about someone else playing a game is better than playing the game yourself. Go figure.