Got home from work a little while ago.... that is, if you consider playing video games and hanging out at Dave and Buster's for most of the afternoon "work". ;)

Yep. That was cool. The fun zone. Lotsa crazy games there. I spent altogether too many credits on that Star Wars game. (Each person was given 100 credits (roughly $20 worth) on the company dime to do with as they please.) The actual game play is on the excessively simplistic side: Aim the joystick cursor at the bad guys, and fire. The computer takes control of most of the rest of it, like direction, movement, which way you're facing, etc. But the thing that's so cool about it is the graphics are so realistic, that it feels like you're actually playing your way through scenes from the movie. Taking out Tie Fighters, blowing up the Deathstar, shooting the Walkers on Hoth, zooming around on Endor.... Just too hard to stop. :)

But the game that was perhaps the biggest hit of the day... lol. Let's just say that a couple of players became exceedingly addicted to a game, which... well, there's been a billion variations of it for the PC. You know, the kind where colored blocks fall from the top, and you have to match up the adjecent colors to make them disappear. Yeah, these two people just sat down, and just kept playing and playing and playing.

Well, eventually this began to draw attention from other members of the party. And, since there were two more unoccupied copies running, others decided to try it out, apparently under the logic of, "Well, if this thing is so much fun that these two can't step away from it, it must be worth playing." I was one of these.

But it just so happened that the forth console, after my card had been swiped through it, froze. Just froze. No game for me. Until that is, we got the attention of an employee to come over and try to fix the problem. And indeed it was fixable. lol.

Took a key, opened up the machine, pressed something, and... tada! A very familiar American Megatrends BIOS bootup screen appeared. It gets worse. The words, "Starting MS-DOS..." appeared on an 80x25 character mode text screen. We all watched with great amusement as messages were displayed for CD-ROM drivers, sound card, and various other ancient style stuff. The hit of the day, and it could easily have been running on some ancient 386 with little more power than my own first computer. lol.

"We don't need no stinkin 3d accelleration, or fully immersive VR. Just a processor from the 80s, a VGA adapter, and a boot loader. And we liked it! We loved it!"

Oh yes. What a joyous occassion.

After leaving the party and arriving home, I hunted down a little more software to further improve the quality of my music conversion. Very nice stuff.

And now, I think I'll go eat again. Peace, vultures.