I’ve never been a big player of computer games. The “kill 'em all” shooters are annoying to me, and I’m not good at them anyway. But I do sometimes like the slower strategy things. I still play StarCraft erratically.
After years of dutiful service, my old computer finally had to be put down, so as of this week I have a new iMac. I decided to get one game to go with it. Based on recommendations and a review, I got “Age of Mythology.”
I am a gaming ingoramus, so I always do the tutorials. The AoM tutorial starts you with Greeks. So I’m sitting here, following instructions, and I’m told to click on a worker. I do. “Wait,” I think to myself, “did he just say μάλιστα?” click… click… “ἔστω”. The little Greek dudes speak Greek! click… click… “voolomay.” “Voolomay? What, by Hades, is that?” Then I spend a few moments thinking about sound rules: βούλομαι (I think).
D’oh! The Ancient Greeks are speaking Modern Greek!
The other two cultures for the game are the Norse and the Ancient Egyptians. I rather imagine the Norse will be speaking Icelandic. I shall be very put out if the Ancient Egyptians speak modern Arabic. Please let it be Coptic!
I got that game a while back. I especially like playing Norse with their mobile storage in the form of ox-carts. Ensemble Studios has a bit of a history with unit voices; they put some in Age of Empires (and the second one) that sounded somewhat like words of the originating culture. I remember back in the day when I used to play them, hearing “Rogan?” from a Roman and “que faire?” from a French villager.
How neat! I remember hearing “voolomay” when my husband played the game, had no idea it was Modern Greek. He has a bunch of other games that use the same game engine. So have you lost many hours of sleep playing the game?
Not yet. While I enjoy games like this, I’ve never been one to sit down and lose 8 hours. If I have other things to do, I’m quite likely to do them. I certainly don’t lose sleep over them.
So I’ve spent part of today furthering the Unixification of the iMac. Now that I have my most beloved tools (Emacs, LaTeX, gv) I’m working on completing an overview of conditional sentences in Homeric Greek for Pharr-a.
But AoM is awfully tempting. I’m usually about 3-5 years behind on the games, and this new engine of theirs is so nice to look at. It’s probably old news to dedicated gamers, but I could sit for hours and just stare at the fish swimming on the startup screen.
(To those of you not in the U.S., or those in the U.S. not in swing states, be thankful. The typing of this silly reply was interrupted by two “please vote tuesday” phone calls.)
Vad! Shooting games are the best! I used to be a Quake III mapper I made one epic map it was a monastery it was so huge and spectacular, had a banquet hall with harry potter ceiling golden taps with bubbles and steam you could turn on and off floating candles swinging axes rotating crossbows reflecting marble floor shiny golden walls basically everything. And the curves used in the arches ooh curves nicer than jessica alba. I never could compile it it was too big for the game engine I don’t play it would have been the most beautiful thing ever ah well.
I used to play that a lot too (by the way, the board game is more challenging .
My husband has been playing Dark Age of Camelot for almost three years now. It has the option to show ‘playing time’ for each character you have created. I don’t want to know .
I try not to get addicted to games. The last time I really lost sleep over a game was with Civilization I back in college, over a decade ago. Last year I got addicted to The Sims, a game already several years old, but I had better self control and didn’t lose too much sleep.
Emacs… that’s a religion, right? lol. I prefer Vim, although I haven’t used it since I remapped my keyboard to Dvorak, which kinda screws up things.
I have to second Epi here…after many hours of frustration looking over databases and banging my head on the desk because I can’t get the macro to do what I need it to do…I have found that blowing several bots into very tiny pieces can be very soothing.
Max Payne 2 has been my latest sho0ter, although you can go wrong with Day of Defeat.
It might have been once. I just want my editor to be programmable, and when I started in on Unix (the late 80s) Emacs was the only editor that could do that. These days VIM is programmable (there’s even a mail reader for it), so there’s no real point to the silly Emacs vs. VI wars any longer.
I don’t play it would have been the most beautiful thing ever ah well.