sequence of stress
December 2, 2009, 12:23 PM by
To start with, I found myself wanting a certain video game related product. I found just one site that had it for a reasonable price.
Yeah, that should have been my first clue. After trying to place an order, my account was billed but their order form returned an error message. Swell. Their forums are down, their help pages 404, and their public email address bounces. Twenty-five dollars I'll never see again. As a bonus, when I did a search on their Paypal email address, I found an eBay account that shared the username and has been suspended. There's no way I could have known that until after I had already lost my money.
Next, my brother decided to cheer me up. He bought me a copy of a video game (Knights of the Old Republic) that he'd been long enjoying, knowing I too loved the subject matter. Yay! My computer's specs were all enough or more than enough, so the framerate might stutter but it'll all be fine.
But I installed it and it turns out that KOTOR hates the Sithly daylights out of my laptop's graphics driver (ATI Radeon Xpress 200m, no longer supported or updated). I can play the game - at one frame per second. Not even joking. I counted. One frame. I stayed up all night that night, trying various alternate drivers, searching for more clues, but nothing has helped. One driver did let me play the game enough to actually move around and enter a new room, but something terribly wrong caused characters' facial features to not actually be on their faces. It was creepy and disturbing and new topic!
Today I've been running System Restore to at least render my laptop usable for non-KOTOR activities. I attempted to alleviate a little stress by playing Earthbound Zero on my DS Lite while I waited. I got completely stuck in a maze of caves, but that was okay; I have the DS browser and Starmen.Net has an EB0 walkthrough with maps. Finally, something I can actually do!
Except it turns out that the PNG maps won't load in the DS Browser. At all. Not even a little. Which is weird, because my own site uses some PNGs and I'd swear they worked in the DS Browser, even had transparency, but these maps won't render even a pixel.
At this point I am afraid to even touch my NES for fear of it managing to explode or something. Also I think I may cry, because the frustration keeps building and I keep running out of ways to ease it.
The worst part is the KOTOR situation. EB0 can wait until my computer is available again, and $25 is not so terribly much to pay for an unfortunate learning experience. (All the same, I sent an email to that site's Paypal email address, and if I don't hear back, I'm filing a dispute in Paypal. No reason for more people to get suckered the same way I did.) But my brother did a very kind thing for me and I'm crushed to be so ungrateful. Why can't my reasonably recent laptop run a game as old as KOTOR? Something to do with poor OpenGL support, I gather, but there's still no excuse for that!
Have decided to read a book. If it tries to fall apart on me, I shall swathe it with enough packing tape to mummify a cow.
