fiend for speed

I called my father's house at six thirty in the morning yesterday. He'd once told me he's awake by five thirty, but it was Sunday. I roused the man and his wife from bed, but they took no apologies. Could be because I'm a fountain of good news, lately. What with favorable paternity test results, and wakefulness before the afternoon. What I didn't tell them was that I'd been asleep since six o'clock A.M. the previous day. Which, is no fault of my own, being on heavy sedatives to control a mental disorder. Of course, I'd skipped my nightly meds of the day I'd slept through, and was thus feeling cocky enough to place the call so early in the morn. But, what matter is it to anyone? With a part time job and Social Security funds flowing from Washington, and now, no kid; I'm not exactly shouldering heaps of responsibility. I said I'd gotten to bed early the night before. A bit of an untruth, but really just truth lacking detail, you'd say? A close friend explained to me that, in his experience, if the truth is written, and written well, one can usually get a person to forgive you no questions asked. My father and step-mother will most probably only chuckle at my outrageous hibernation before depriving them of their final minutes of REM sleep, that Sunday.

However, I've been maintaining a half-truth as to a purchase I made some time ago. I knew visiting family members would take note of my large new wide screen monitor. What they don't, or didn't, know is that it's attached to the brand new computer tower, with which it came packaged. It was a hefty purchase, done entirely for entertainment purposes. It's got one trillion bytes of space for game files, and a video accelerator card that will knock your stockings off. The kinds of productivity I use a computer for were more than covered by my previous machine. Word processing, web applications such as Blogger, miscellaneous other Internet tasks, two-dimensional graphics editing, and web design are all done pretty easily on systems dated as far back as five years. The machine came with the very pretty, new operating system, Windows' Vista. The new monitor has a gloss coat to it, which compliments the system well, looking as if it were forged from polished glass. No, I couldn't hide the frivolousness of twenty-two inches of high definition. But, the computer tower is black, and fit nicely into the bottom right compartment of my desk, out of sight. So, yes, folks, I dropped a wad on an out-of-sight gaming machine. And, if I'm going to be so idle as to play computer games, I may as well use one tenth of my screen resolution to further my writing career on the subject.

When I called my father's, I asked just which art museum in my town was hosting a woven poncho that my step-mother made several years ago. He said he'd have breakfast, come down, and take me there. My step-mother planned to go cross country skiing with a friend, so it'd be just us. Which, is not necessarily preferable, but nice. We saw the museum, which had some very expensive pieces hanging, especially since the last exhibit I saw there. The poncho looked machine woven, very impressive. There was a small photography exhibit, and I queried my father on some of the techniques; he's a photographer by trade. One photo really bugged me, however. It was of a tree, a photo shopped tree. I looked at the light rainbow noise gauzed over the picture and realized, cripes! I could do that. Really, it's a matter of a few simple filters. In fact, I could dig on my hard drive for a picture with the same set of effects. So I bitched a little about my photographic purism... and realized I might have the skills to sell two hundred dollar prints just like it. I had a little change of heart. Ah, but my father is the right person to visit a museum with. With most family members, every particle of my soul is screaming to get the hell out of there and go to the mall. My dad's great, though. We did spend some time with the poncho, but we were out to lunch in twenty-five tops.

We had Mexican, and headed over to the big strip mall dominating a large stretch along the freeway. Sure, Best Buy is supposed to be your one stop electronics store, but Radioshack sits two storefronts down in the mall. Sure, Best Buy's got your Guitar Hero guitar control pads, but Radioshack carries a real guitar. Cheap and chintzy, but still the better alternative. I found that Radioshack also carried a sound card game port to universal serial bus adapter, for cheap! Where as none were to be found at Best Buy. I'm generally gravitated toward the aisles of games at Best Buy. So, although they didn't carry my adapter, I sniffed around by the car racing DVDs. My car racing games of choice are that of the future. No, not ones that have not yet been written. Ones with a setting in the future, or on other planets, or worlds in the universe. The original F-Zero for Super Nintendo will always be one of my favorites. It didn't appear as though the selection offered any futuristic games. Just, some Need For Speed games, with today-cars in cities of today. Then I realized, I am in a store, and this store is selling portable communication devices that take and send photos and movies, and there are video cameras__high quality__that you can hold with your thumb and forefinger... There are televisions with several millions of pixels on display__That kid's shoes are blinking! For cripes' sake! I am in the future! I grabbed the cheapest Need For Speed auto racer, and tracked down Dad, hanging out by the Blue Ray TVs.

As we approached the counter, my father offered to buy me the Need For Speed game, since he had been sick around my birthday, and claimed he didn't give me much. I said it was alright, but if he wanted to, that'd be great. Pretty swell. I'd been checked out by this saleslady before. Real cute one, also very young. She wears her hair parted to one side, one side hanging down over one eye. Ooh. We'd bantered a bit the last time I was in, also buying video games, then too. She asked my dad if he had a members' card. He didn't, but I did. I slid it out of my wallet, but a bit of paper was severely stuck to it. I said something extremely witty, but for the life of me, I can't recall what it was. I thanked her, and sort of felt her watch me as I turned toward the door. Girls have a real effect on me sometimes. Though the graphics by today's standards are terrible, I was mesmerized by all three installments of Tomb Raider, and swinging little Lara Croft around the mazes. In the new Half-Life series, you have a female sidekick, very realistically rendered. My last game purchase was Microsoft's Flight Simulator. I enjoyed very much flying a double prop through the great arch in St. Louis, and perhaps there's some subconscious symbology in that. Though, I might have made more of an effort to learn how to land if the player had a female co-pilot, or even flight attendant. I wasn't sure Need For Speed: Carbon Collector's Edition would have anything to satiate my need for graphical sex.

My dad was getting sleepy, so he dropped me off at my apartment with my new game and adapter for a vintage game controller with which I planned to drive my cars around. I got the controller set up, inserted the DVD, and got ready for the big install... (Smoking, nose picking, a few strums on the guitar.) We're ready. Well, what do you know, right out of the cage and we've got a female. I can't remember what she said her name was, but out of a sleek mobile came a girl with cleavage__and a public service message? She says, "The moves you make in this game are not real... obey the laws of the road... wear your seatbelt... blah, blah, blah..." Interesting how the anarchy-sim Bioshock didn't come with a disclaimer for players not to actually shoot people in the head with a revolver. Or, for Flight Simulator__don't climb into the cockpit of a jetliner with zero hours of flight time in your experience. The girl shows up again at race time, strutting around the cars as they rev up, and shouting "Go!" to start the race. Something was wrong though, she had the physical aspect of a really hot dwarf, kind of squashed. I checked the video options of the game. Humph, it was set to a square monitor resolution. I have a wide screen. No settings for wide screen. Humph. People write hacks to make this kind of thing not a problem, so I headed for Google. There were a few dead ends, since I have the Collector's Edition and not straight up NFS: Carbon. I uncovered something that looked the most promising of anything I'd seen so far. It was "Need-For-Speed-Carbon-CE-Widescreen-Patch.rar" So, I clicked it, and it gave me a few instructions on how to download and open the file, nothing I really needed help with. Then it told me I just installed something that would allow me to download sexy screen savers, which are the kind of screen savers I tend not to use, as to be polite to my guests. Not to mention, it wasn't what I clicked on. Then, without touching anything, it wanted to show me a sexy movie, "Brother rapes Sister." Also, not what I asked for, and very not sexy, to me. It took me three restarts to clear the installation from my computer, and was quite a setback. Anyway, I found a wide screen hack, and the wheels of the cars aren't at all egg shaped, anymore. Plus, Ms. Safety Sanchez looks a bit taller.

The game is fun, despite some scathing reviews I encountered on my way to the wide screen hack. And I suppose it should be. The game is two years old, and built for video accelerators that are much older than mine. Going as fast as you can is all fine and good for winning races, but there are other ways to enjoy the game. For one, you can keep it in second gear, and take in some of the stunning scenery. It's strangely futuristic. Your crew member will bitch at you over the CB if you do this, which is another reward. And, you can pull a U turn and run the race backwards. Your crew member really gets pissed if you do this. And, if you're anything like me, you can drive an automatic transmission, instead of manual, and actually place. The sports cars really are beautiful works of art, like the long stiletto heeled leg of an expensive hooker. The vehicles are futuristically indestructible, too. My foot is getting heavy just speaking of all this. I must have really been moved to put it down long enough to write this. But alas__I really do have a Need For Speed...