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2002-02-11 Entry: "Frustrating Weekend"

My computer is still misbehaving. I've finally got it to the point where it'll recognize the CD and DVD drive most of the time. Both hard disks are no problem, but occasionally the bios misses the other two.

Ignoring this minor problem, I'm also having disk recognition difficulties. The DVD drive has always been flakey as far as recognition of a standard CD is concerned. It's fine with CD-Rs, CD-RWs and DVDs, but tends to spin in place when presented with a standard CD-ROM. However, now my CD-ROM drive is being equally flakey. It'll only recognize a CD-ROM inserted if the DVD drive currently has a CD-ROM that it recognizes inserted. Which is a little frustrating!

I'm not sure what I can do about this...

Meanwhile, I continued playing "The Longest Journey" on Sunday. I don't think this game will make the record for adventure which takes me longest to complete. That award goes hands down to "Flight Of The Amazon Queen" which was ridiculously easy up until the ruined temple section, which saw me solving one puzzle every three months or so.

No, The Longest Journey has taken me a while just because I keep losing interest mid game. Most of the game is fairly simple, go to A, talk to B type puzzles. However, the handful of mechanical puzzles I've been faced with have been almost totally unclued, and I've found myself reaching for the solution on multiple occasions. It's not as if I'm playing to bang my head against the screen for hours.

Anyway, the most annoying thing about the game is the lead character. She's got some sort of destiny, and she has to travel around collecting things to fulfill it. However, she takes no responsibility for her actions - case in point, during Sunday's play, she sank a ship in a storm. She deliberately sends it off course to try and complete her mission, then once the storm strikes she sinks the ship while trying to retrieve her magical doo-hickey. When she awakens floating on the wreckage, she learns that the crew got away in a lifeboat, but that wasn't exactly her concern when she was attacking the hold with an axe.

She spends a lot of time bemoaning her fate and complaining about the prophecies she's forever fulfilling, but she's not growing as a character. She takes no responsibility for her life or actions, blaming it on her destiny.

Meanwhile, the game is organized into chapters, and when the mission is explained - get four pieces of some magical tablet, and find some dragons - it looks like the game will be rather long. And so it seems, as each attempt to get a piece of the tablet turns into a number of subquests. However, they seem to be wrapping things up rather quickly now. Chapters 8 and 9 should see me having half the tablet. That means two more to find and then a conclusion in only three chapters. I think there's something up with the timeline there...

Well, that was disorganised. I appear to have lost the thread of whatever point I was trying to make...

The parcel I picked up Saturday was a second set of Highlander DVDs. I had a horrible feeling this would happen. Hopefully, the demand will mean I'll be able to sell them fairly easily. It's not as if I really need two season one boxed sets!