Poor Fractured Tantalus
Jul 11, 2007 · peterb · 2 minute readGames
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."](http://tleaves.com/2006/02/13/games-lovers- play/)
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.