What a full day today has been. Â Full in a manner of speaking. Â I suppose a day cannot be considered truly full if it begins at 11:51 a.m. Â I stayed up really, really ridiculously late almost all week. Â Last night in particular. Â At about 9:30 I went and found a couple of old games and that was pretty much that. Â Review and discussion after the jump. Â 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. Â I had the first two of them and so I went and sought them out. Â It doesn’t run very well on a laptop as you need a keypad to really drive properly. Â It was one of the first 3D games I ever played and also probably the goriest. Â 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. Â The American version (which was the one I found) is rather less splattery. Â The censors got at it and changed all the people to these bizarre green zombies. Â As I read this over, there isn’t really anything appealing in the descriptions I’ve just given. Â Suffice to say I was having a good time with it. Â My plan for the coming week is to go to bed before 11:00 every night.