What a full day today has been.  Full in a manner of speaking.  I suppose a day cannot be considered truly full if it begins at 11:51 a.m.  I stayed up really, really ridiculously late almost all week.  Last night in particular.  At about 9:30 I went and found a couple of old games and that was pretty much that.  Review and discussion after the jump.  It’s pretty geeky, I’ll just warn you right off the top.

The first of my treasures really took me back.  Death Rally first came to me as a demo in a Computer Gaming Monthly or similar magazine sometime in 1996 or early 97.  I spent hours driving in fairly small circles blowing up tiny imaginary enemies.  It was especially fun after I learned the cheat codes.  I dug up the exact same demo that I had back in the day.  I played that for a solid hour after spending 45 minutes or so figuring out how to run it under XP.  Eventually I wound up with DosBox which, as near as I can tell, is a DOS emulator that effectively takes up all sorts of excess CPU cycles and lets you run stuff that would run super-duper fast otherwise.  When running a program, it runs one of my cores up to about 48% load.

As a total side bar, Dr. Who is a really great show.  We’re a little over halfway through the Christopher Eccleston season.  Captain Jack is so gay.

After DR, I went and found Carmageddon.  I had the first two of them and so I went and sought them out.  It doesn’t run very well on a laptop as you need a keypad to really drive properly.  It was one of the first 3D games I ever played and also probably the goriest.  Basically the idea behind the games is to drive around a racecourse but in order to get enough time to actually finish the race, you have to run down pedestrians and try to destroy the other competitors.  The American version (which was the one I found) is rather less splattery.  The censors got at it and changed all the people to these bizarre green zombies.  As I read this over, there isn’t really anything appealing in the descriptions I’ve just given.  Suffice to say I was having a good time with it.  My plan for the coming week is to go to bed before 11:00 every night.

and can’t get out