The Sporks of the Titmice

[rain_gryphon]

Record cold in Russia, presumably worse even than the winter of '42. It's got to be dramatically cold if the Russians are inconvenienced by it.

I love the picture that accompanies this article. They describe them as swimming, but honestly, it looks like they're playing curling with a naked fat man for the stone.

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Here it's quite pleasant for January. It's been in the 50s and 60s most of the month, apart from this Tuesday, which was bitterly cold and snowy for about 16 hours.

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There's a planetary mission to Pluto on its way. I remember seeing the first blurry pictures from Mars, so many years ago. Now the last unexplored planet is due to be inspected. Somehow you wouldn't think that an Atlas could hold enough chemical energy to throw something all the way to Pluto. Calculations and intuition are two different things.

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There's an old Heinlein juvenile called "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel", which features a lovely furry alien called The Mother-Thing. At one point she's stranded on Pluto, and calmly walks outside, naked, to set off the rescue beacon that will summon help. She freezes solid in the process, of course, but has faith that her people's technology will restore her. That scene always stuck with me. There's something strangely romantic about that.

Sadly, the cover of the current edition cuts off about half of the Mother-Thing's face. I've got my old late 70s copy, with the same cover painting, but showing a much wider field. I wonder if the cover art got damaged or something.

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I'm finally getting a (used) Sega Dreamcast so that I can play Spirit of Speed. I bought the game long ago, as I correctly apprehended that it wasn't going to stick around long. There was supposed to have been a PC version, but I never could find it, so I settled for the Dreamcast one, but couldn't bring myself to pay full retail for a gaming system that I wanted for one game. Now they've come down to a more reasonable price.

Spirit of Speed's about open-wheeled racing from 1924 to 1953, but concentrating mainly on the Auto-Union/Mercedes era of the late 30s. Not unsurprisingly, the general gaming community despised it (cars too slow, handle like lumberwagons, no music, etc) but the reviews from racing sim sites praise it for reasonably realistic physics and car handling. Most important to me is that you get tracks like Brooklands and the old Monza, and cars like the Auto-Union C and D, and the Mercedes 125 (the swastika-challenged paintjob, unsurprisingly). You can drive the Railton at Brooklands. The great lack is that they didn't manage to include Indianapolis, although they've thrown in a Miller 91 RWD, and a fictional "Colorado" counterclockwise oval track.

I can't for the life of me see how someone can list "no music" as a defect in a racing game.

Now I need to scrounge a copy of Grand Prix Legends...

Comments

[magnusdiridian.livejournal.com]

thats crazy. 34 below,lowest i ever felt was 5 below.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

One night in Chicago, many years ago, I was out one night when it was -30F. Slush lumps that had fallen off of cars earlier had frozen into ice chunks, and I'd kick them down the street and listen to the peculiar high-pitched clatter that they made. They sounded like metal, almost.

And some bastard stole my gloves. Out of a church, no less.

[loganberrybunny.livejournal.com]

I've got the PC version of Spirit of Speed - bought it for a fiver several years ago - and though I don't like it anything like as much as Grand Prix Legends it's fun for a while and the tracks and cars are nicely atmospheric. It's long deleted, though - probably the best place to find it would be eBay UK, where two copies have gone (for peanuts) in the last week.

As I recall, the PC game sold very badly at full price, largely on account of a spectacularly badly-done demo which made the cars almost impossible to control - and not in a good way. It was so bad that I actually had more success driving with the keyboard than any other method! The full game was a big improvement, but the damage was done.

At one point there were tentative plans for a sequel, I think to be based around the late 1950s (I vaguely remember mention of a Vanwall) but those appear to have come to nothing, and there isn't a big enough userbase to produce the huge numbers of third-party addons that GPL has, so really you're more or less stuck with what's in the box, even for the PC version.

cars too slow

I always found that a very strange criticism. I don't think I'd call a Type D Auto Union slow, nor an Alfa Romeo Bimotore. Having said that, I'm not sure the feeling of speed in SoS is all that it might be: going 200mph in the Alfa somehow doesn't feel as fast as it should.

I can't for the life of me see how someone can list "no music" as a defect in a racing game.

There's plenty of music! Just not in the sense those people mean. =;)

Overall, I prefer GPL by a factor of quite-a-lot, though it's a slightly unfair comparison as that has been updated a lot and has huge numbers of addons available. There's nothing in SoS that's quite as much fun as sliding an Eagle around Stavelot and the choice of tracks is far more limited in SoS. Having said all that, I'd be interested to hear what you made of SoS when you've had some time to play with it. =:)

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I'll certainly post a report once I've played with it a bit. And I'm embarassed to note that I confused the W153 with the W196 - that's where my reference to "1953" came from.

At any rate, I'm looking forward to playing with it :)

[xolo.livejournal.com]

And while I'm thinking on it, you have seen Grand Prix (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060472/), I hope? It's a fictional account of the 1966 F1 season. There's vast amounts of beautiful period racing sequences, and it's also a sensible, realistic story about racing - none of the over the top silliness that you see in a lot of racing movies.

I know one bit of trivia about the film that IMDB seems to have missed as well. When Dan Gurney's exhaust pipe falls off at Monza, I'm reasonably sure that's in reference to a fuss that he made at Indianapolis that spring. He mounted a flat spoiler plate behind the engine, over the top of the pipes, with little straps encircling the pipes. It was plainly an aerodynamic device, and they made him take it off, but he swore up and down that it was a safety device to prevent the exhaust pipes from being shaken loose and falling off. For many years thereafter, questionable aero devices were referred to as "Gurney braces".

[loganberrybunny.livejournal.com]

And while I'm thinking on it, you have seen Grand Prix, I hope?

Of course. =:) I think I remember BBC2 showing it back-to-back with Le Mans. Incidentally, it's rumoured (fairly solidly) that the designers of GPL had Grand Prix playing around the office during the development process - GPL is based on the 1967 season.

I hadn't thought of the Gurney reference, but it makes a lot of sense to me.