A familiar sight: the white dominated screen of the new post tab of blogger. It's been some time since I've posted in the blog ... or for that matter commit any sort of ink (electronic or otherwise) to any sort of writing surface. The reason was simple: exhaustion..... for want of a better word. I had renounced all form of effort required for doing anything I deemed of importance ever since the summer holidays came to the most boring end: a normal one. Even now... it is only by sheer force and will that my fingers crawl across the keyboard painfully stroking down keys one by one. I started blogging more or less as a catharsis for all that was pent up in my life. Well ... now ... I'm emotionally spent. All that remains is pure nothingness.... pure vacuum; empty.
So how does one deal with this after the same spot was once a dangerous roller coaster ride? Well.. by distraction; not thinking about the fact that there is nothing there. And how does one distract oneself from this without working?? Well, there are people all around the world working on things that can help you do this. This enterprise is in a peak of sorts and has been responsible for many millionaires in the past decade or so. And the geek mind has taken to these products more readily than to something obvious like say... real life. That's right ladies and gents... video games.
And that's right I'm into gaming. Not in a big "I want to be the guy who can frag someone using a rail gun in mid air" kinda way (Quake reference here, although I'm not really interested in the game). In fact, my interest lies only in racing games and so I went after the NFS series. The most obvious choices was the underground series because unlike a lot of people I find cops on my tail trying to run me of the road in mostly fatal ways while I'm trying to race completely badass tracks and negotiating completely badass turns a little painful somewhere. But once they were done I was tired with the urban landscape. I wanted something different ... and so I looked for the games at the other end of the spectrum -- off road races... and in particular ... rally races of which I found three. Let's just quickly see what they were:

1> Colin McRae DiRt
2> Microsoft Rallisport Challenge
3> Sega Rally

The first in this list was an 8gb iso + 12 gb on hard disk whopper -- not something my 1gb RAM and 256MB graphics card was ready to handle and the game ended up playing coughing up frames like an old man with lung cancer. Don't get me wrong though... whatever little I did see of the game was awesome.... with a brilliant menu system that has you salivating at it for a few minutes before you feel like going in for a race. And the menu helps... taking you through several options that end up actually taking a few mins to get to your first race. But enough about this... onto less magnificent things
And so came Microsoft's offering that truly was less magnificent. The game wasn't all that bad and the tracks were actually well thought out and challenging. What did however start jarring later was the back view of some cars while you were racing with a third person view which were severe enough to have been fashioned out of rectangles alone. The sad thing is these masterpieces of cubism are actually third level unlocks which ends up being.... well ... anticlimactic. The real sad thing about the game, though, is the physics which ends up annoying the s*it out of you (as proof is the fact that this game has qualified as the most sworn-at-by-me game I've every played... and that's including the 2D Prince of Persia games... 1 & 2). Cars totaling over as if they had no mass.... rival cars banging at you like they had infinite mass letting you spin out of control while they zoomed on ahead without any effect on their paths whatsoever. And then there was the absence of the reset button which basically made sure that every time you actually did end up facing the wrong way.. even though it wasn't your fault... you would lose at least 5 secs on your opponents.
(cont...)