Productivity's bane

Monday, May 19, 2003 » gaming update

Happy Lauraday!

I was pretty excited to get working on my E3 section and things seemed to be moving along pretty well, until Ken messages me out of nowhere to tell me he is playing the Linux port of That Game. Huh, I think to myself. If the Linux port is done, then surely so must the OS X version be. And surely enough, it was, and I immediately found myself downloading and installing That Game. That Game being the game that transcends a title of legendary, the game that, when I attempt to single out the number one videogame of all time (a task which I find myself confronted with quite often), somehow always manages to stick out as the only obvious candidate. While all the Final Fantasies are too busy fighting it out with each other, where Tetris falls short because of its lack of personality... That Game prevails. I am, of course, speaking of the one and only Star Control II. The game that, despite being coded over ten years ago for a dead operating system, has managed to reemerge back onto every modern OS via its ferociously dedicated fanbase and, of course, its extraordinary creators. The epic quest across an impossibly large universe, the rock-solid gameplay, the outlandish music, and, of course, some of the best writing and characters ever to grace the medium are all preserved in Star Control II's multiplatform incarnation, The Ur-Quan Masters. The OS X version is actually violently unstable, but I can deal with the crashes. This is Star Control.

So, I guess my point is that for the last 24 hours, instead of doing anything productive, I've been playing Star Control II. This is going to turn into a problem very quickly seeing as I have three weeks and as many papers due before finals, but I'll deal with them when the time comes. Right now I need more exotic minerals, because my flagship is sorely lacking in good old hellbore cannons. And we can't have that, can we?