So on Sunday dad came up with Jen’s trailer to help haul off my furniture. Luckily Aidan & Travis had been cool with keeping the couch & chairs, which saved me having to find a home for them, only to probably sell or give them away later. Since I’d already hauled off two car-loads of my stuff, which was the bulk of it, there wasn’t much left to do. Everything fitted into my car, dad’s car & the trailer with reasonable room to spare. We then headed off, after a few circuits through the house to try in vain to determine if I’d forgotten anything.
The drive down wasn’t that great; bad traffic and poor luck with the lights. Also, from memory Middleborough road was closed over the weekend, so Springvale road was probably copping some of the overflow. I only remembered that just as I was about to turn off onto Middleborough, but when I saw that there was a not a single car waiting to turn onto it (unheard of in daylight hours) I remembered.
As it turns out, I rocked up at dad’s place just seconds after he did. We both went more or less the same way – he probably went all the way down Mannigham road to the Eastern, where as I cut down Albert Street to the Burwood so-called-highway – what kind of highway is one lane, pot-holled, and 60km/h?! *ahem* Anyway, it was uncanny. :)
It took a little while, as it does, to unload everything. Luckily there wasn’t all that much furniture, as I noted, and most of it found satisfactory temporary homes, aside from the drawers still sitting in the lounge room.
Just as I’d been pulling out of the driveway, Bobo announced via SMS that she’d finished my cake, so I arranged to pop over to her place later that night to taste test it. :D When I’d been around at Sket’s early in the week I’d been flipping through a recipe book that was open on the bench, and found a rather tempting chocolate cake thingy of some sort… it was meant to be apricoty, but Bobo redid it in her own style with jam and chocolate dirt stuff instead of shavings, ’cause she was lazy. :P
It tasted very good though, in any case, although was a little bereft of icing, which Bobo eventually admitted was because she’d eaten half of it while making the cake. :)
I’d just had dinner before popping around to Bobo’s, though, so I wasn’t up for eating the whole cake; maybe a third or a quarter or so. Anyway, she also had her cousin (?) stop by, all the way from San Francisco, although she and her partner left after a short while. Since they spoke primarily in Chinese while there, I didn’t catch much of the conversation.
Although it was funny, because Bobo had finally picked up her new laptop and brought it home, and her dad was immediately attracted to it, and begun playing and asking all sorts of questions. And while he talked to Bobo in Chinese, nearly all the computer words were spoken in English – no direct equivalents, I guess – and so I actually understood a lot of what was said. :D I surprised Bobo in that, by saying something about Rachel’s computer and an external drive case and whatnot, which had been what she’d just been talking about. I guess she’d never really noticed how much English is used when talking about computers, even in Chinese (I can never remember whether it’s Mandarin or Cantonese that she speaks… meh :P ).
So that was interested, even though I mostly just sat there and ate things occasionally while everything went on around me. :) Then, abruptly, nearly everyone left, so then Bobo & I could actually talk again without constant interruption. :D
She’d gone via Gus’ place on her way home, and had him do whatever to the new computer in preparation for her use. That included installing Black & White 2, apparently. :D Bobo fired that up after I’d played with her laptop for a bit – using the built-in 1.3MP camera to take many bad photos of her, much to her disgust :D – and started playing, with me helping her along a bit. I’d never actually seen B&W 2 in the pixels, aside from screen shots in reviews, so I was quite curious to see what had changed from the first one. I was a little disappointed in a lot of regards… it’s certainly a better game than the first one, but the first one is really old now, and the new version really doesn’t seem to have progressed as much as it should have in that time. The graphics are marginally improved – you now have grass and ants, whoopee, and there’s a few new features like Godbuilding and the reworked building construction and whatnot… but yeah, it seemed to be same-old same-old for the most part. Plus, it ran really rather poorly on Bobo’s brand new laptop, which isn’t too much of a slouch – Core 2 Duo T5500 (1.66GHz) with a Mobility Radion X1700 – which disturbed me a bit, given B&W 1 ran just peachy on nana’s 1GHz Athlon with a GeForce 2!
But I suspect it’s just the usual case of the OEM Windows install having that much extra crap included… sigh… I’m surprised Gus didn’t reformat it for her, but perhaps didn’t want to spend the time on it… I wouldn’t have expected Bobo to being playing B&W myself, so I probably wouldn’t have bother either.
Anyway, I think it’s actually something Bobo could quite get into… she seemed to enjoy it for the most part; the tutorials are long and tedious, and probably a very serious discouragement to new players, but Bobo was persistent enough to get through the worst ones and into the actual game. And while she said she wanted to be a Good God, she kept doing evil things like throwing some random guy into a cliff on the side of a mountain, or dropping a giant boulder on her own temple, etc etc. ;)
It’s actually disturbing how they’ve changed the balance from the first one; if you actually follow the instructions in the second one, you become very evil. In the first one it was pretty neutral; you tended to go slightly evil as an experienced player, simply due to carelessness, but that was minor. I do remember there was a lot of talk about adjusting the balances, and making it easier for evil players to actually succeed – ergo the new armies feature.
Anyway, aside from that we talked for a fair while, and once again I finally got home to bed at some late hour of the morning. One of these days I will get an actual on-time night’s sleep, really. :D
