2001-07-12 - 11:40 p.m.

More Tinkering

Okay, I take back what I said before about the graphics of Carmageddon 2000, they really are very good.

What happened is that Lily tinkered with my computer some more, and she discovered that for some reason some applications weren't recognizing my nifty new video card. So she found a way to get the card up and running, and suddenly - blammo! - ultra cool graphics.

The cars and the cities are much more detailed, and all the powerups, which were formless blobs in the old version, are now cool little 3D rotating things.

With the better graphics playing is much more fun and now I seem to be getting the hang of the game. Now I actually have a minute or two in some of the races to goof around and go exploring.

However, with this expansion of computing power there have been some losses.

I was hoping to keep playing Carmageddon 2, but with the upgrade I lost all my saved games and all the new cars I added. My super-hard, super-fast jet car is gone. If I wanted to I suppose I could download it again.

However, I did play a couple of games of Carmageddon 2 anyway, and the new powerful video card had greatly improved the look of this game too.

When I had first installed the game on my old machine it had looked like that, but it was obvious that the game was straining my video card to its limit. Chunks of the video display would turn black as I was playing the game and the card struggled to keep up. Crashes were common. Eventually my computer made an executive decision to downgrade the video display of Carmageddon. It became much more pixilated, but a lot less crash-prone.

It was nice to see Carma 2 restored to its old self, but I don’t know if I'm going to play it again. It was frustrating starting all over again from scratch, but more significantly my computer didn't seem to like the game. Both times I played it the computer acted very finicky afterwards and needed to be rebooted. So, goodbye to the past.

Now if you'll excuse me, I got some serious gameplaying to do. I'm going to go tearing through the slums in my souped-up death mobile, merrily running people over.