Maybe I should just go read a good book...

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

- Jack Kerouac, Author

I just wanted to play a game tonight, to get lost in some other world for awhile. After thumbing through my CDs for a bit, fighting paralysis from all of the choices, I decided to finally dive into one of the many space combat sims I've collected but haven't played. I figured I'd start with the last remaining game I have that uses Glide, IWAR. I've been itching to get rid of my Voodoo2 card for awhile, but have always had an old game or two in the queue that needed it. IWAR is the last. But that's beside the point. Being a hardcore sim, it was necessary that I create a HOTAS profile for IWAR before I play it. So, I put a good hour into creating a config for my Saitek throttle and joystick. This is when things started to go bad. The Saitek software sucks. Oh, it's "powerful", there's no denying that. I can control input timings down to the millisecond, but the programming utility crashes on me. Repeatedly. Once I finally get a config hammered out, it doesn't work. So I reboot. Then it works. So I start up IWAR, ready to test out my meticulously crafted control scheme. IWAR won't start. It crashes. So I reboot. Now IWAR starts, but the Saitek config isn't working again, so I exit IWAR and reapply the saitek config. Now IWAR won't start, so I reboot.

This continues for some random number of reboots until finally the stars align and everything works. By this time, admittedly, some of the desire to play has waned. But I'm fairly conditioned and so shake off the 90 minutes I've spent "playing". I'm immediately rewarded for my efforts with the realization that I, apparently, suck at IWAR. I can't complete the first tutorial mission, wherein I'm required to navigate through a bunch of rings in space, with little margin for error. I can't do it, despite roughly a dozen attempts. So I take a quick peek at the IWAR website and look for a tip. It suggests something about setting a fixed speed and using thrusters. Affirmative, tried that. But I try again, thinking perhaps I was just being heavy-handed with the physics model. No joy. Another dozen failures.

But I'm not bitter yet. I'm still bright eyed and want to blow stuff up, so I decide to put IWAR back in the bag for another day, and pull out Tachyon. Unfortunately, this calls for another hour cooking up a Saitek profile for the throttle and joystick. So I do that. But now Tachyon crashes. Repeatedly. I wind up editing a little line in a text file that says "GAMEPLAYED=1". I don't know why, I just tried it and it worked.

But by this point I am bitter, and the evening is basically shot. I've spent the whole night fighting with crappy software for my joystick, and dodging driver problems because I have to use a win98 partition because the company that made my video card went out of business and there isn't a winXP driver for it.

It's nights like this that leave me wondering why I play PC games. The feeling passes pretty quick. I usually just sleep it off. Just in case, though, I went ahead and ordered some hardware so I can put together a new PC. A P4 with a Radeon 9700 Pro. New hardware will make all the software work and the games more fun, right?