Tuesday, August 9, 2011

GoG, How I Love Thee

I recently learned of Good Old Games, and had an opportunity to try them out over the weekend by purchasing a re-packaged version of Heroes of Might and Magic II, one of my favorite strategy games of all time.

This evening, I got it up and running again, and the memories have started to flow back to the summers of 1996-1998!

Even better: the game was on sale, and I was able to pay seamlessly via PayPal.

I strongly suspect GoG will be getting more of my money in the future for this excellent service targeted at exactly my market segment. :)

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Classic Ultima Resurrected?

My jaw dropped today to learn of some very exciting news: Classic Ultima games are going to be commercially available once again!

Electronic Arts, the giant game corporation that absorbed Richard Garriott's Origin, has apparently struck a deal with Good Old Games to introduce Ultima to a modern audience.

I can't wait. I also hadn't heard of GoG until today.

So... I'm probably going to be spending some hard-earned money on modern variants of Ultima, if only to be able to play Pagan on modern hardware. As a bonus, GoG is bundling the EA cluebooks -- a very rare commodity these days!

In other Ultima news that wouldn't interest those who are not total nerds on the subject, I stumbled across a link containing juicy details regarding the Bob White Plot which was rejected in favor of a hastily-produced Ultima 9 that broke much of the wonderful story continuity between Ultimas VII, VII:Serpent Isle, and VIII:Pagan.

I know what I'm going to be reading for fun this weekend!

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Time for Some Maintenance [Macintosh SpinRite]

My home Mac has been acting up lately. Very slow to boot, occasional spinning beachball while hard disk activity is taking place... all signs of HDD weariness.

Today I finally bit the bullet and screwed up enough courage to delve into the disassembly of my iMac4,1 so that I could get access to its hard drive and run the ever-venerable SpinRite upon it.

It is a pain in the behind to get access to that hard disk. I needed Torx screwdrivers, in addition to prying the lid of the front face (taped down to boot) and making a big mess on my floor.

It was enough to get access to the SATA interface with my nifty SATA-to-USB adapter. My PC laptop can then safely SpinRite the Mac disk nearly in-place.



Of course, I'd much rather be able to run SpinRite natively. Perhaps that will come in SR7... :)