Valve may just make first-person shooters (Half-Life), which are not my favorite genre, but they do it so well.

Left 4 Dead is a zombie game.  Four heavily-armed survivors have to make their way out of a city infested with zombie hordes.

The best way to play is with four friends on the net.  The game is designed so that a player alone is very soon a player dead — you constantly need friends to rescue you and cover your back.

The zombies are fast — more like 28 Days Later than Night of the Living Dead.  And there are special zombies to keep things interesting.  The pacing is excellent, and the music feels like a soundtrack, and adds to the game.  It’s rare that I don’t turn the music off first thing.

And it’s fun to play over and over.  Just because you’ve done a level a dozen times doesn’t make it predictable the 13th time.

If I had to nitpick, I’d say the single player game is less fun than multiplayer — but the single player game is still awfully fun.  And I wish I could play on a Mac.

If anybody wants to friend me on Steam, I’m Joedelta, as usual.

Mary and the girls were off visiting relatives last week.  I meant to spend the boring lonely days doing taxes, but instead I fought a pesky PC virus for a couple of days (better now), and read a couple of books, and played computer games.  Whee!

Not that different from my normal weeks, really, except a lot more solitary.  And the food wasn’t as good.

Anyway, the game I played most was Prototype, which was reasonably fun.  It’s basically Grand Theft Auto, except there’s very little driving, and your character is an insanely powerful genetically engineered murderous freak bent on exacting bloody revenge for the viral zombie plague destroying Manhattan.

The main thing I found interesting about this game was how marvelously powerful your character is right from the beginning.  Want to run up the side of the Empire State building, then leap down, crashing full-speed into a tank?  No problem for you, and it annoys the tank greatly.

The storyline is interesting, and one gets to make lots of choices about how to gain new powers, and the control is for the most part fluid and fun.  (My PC tended to bogg when fighting in the Hive.)  It’s a bit gory, and the things you do are morally repugnant, but, like in Grand Theft Auto, eventually you stop thinking of the civilians as people when you accidentally mow down a couple dozen.

And it’s kind of satisfying to leap onto a flying helicopter, tear the door off, and skyjack it.  Then you can fly to ridiculous heights, leap out of the chopper, and create incredible destruction on your collision with the ground.

Not bad.

Buttermilk may not be especially delicious to drink, but buttermilk with chocolate syrup in it is way worse.

Now how do I get the taste out of my mouth?

So Lyra Meadow’s iMac G4/800 (from maybe 2002?) wouldn’t boot, after years of reliable (if sluggish) performance.

I wanted to reinstall the OS, but the CD drive hasn’t worked in years.  (Who needs ‘em?)

Back in the pre-OS X days, I could have just copied a fresh system folder onto the hard drive and been done with it.  Alas, with the unix core, that doesn’t work any more.

The iMac wouldn’t boot from an external USB hard drive.  Ah, but it will boot from an external firewire drive.  Alas, I don’t seem to have one of those at the moment.

But my friend Howard, as it turns out, had dropped one off recently with some files on it for the girls.  Sweet!  I backed up the data on that drive, wiped it, and restored the OS 10.5 DVD onto it.

I’d probably have preferred 10.4, but I couldn’t find a DVD, and making the firewire drive pretend to be 4 CD drives sounded problematic.

I booted the iMac from the firewire drive, started the install process — but oh no! It didn’t meet the minimum system requirements.  While the documentation I had said that a G4/800 was the minimum, it seems that at the last minute Apple raised the requirements to G4/867.  Poo!

I thought about putting the Mac into firewire drive mode and installing it on a different Mac, but I don’t seem to have any running PPC Macs around, and I bet it would install wrong if it thought it was going onto an Intel Mac.

Some research on the net found a way to spoof the open firmware into reporting the Mac as faster than it really is.  And with the Mac thinking it’s fast, the Installer decided it was OK to install.  (Why does it take 2 hours to install the OS nowadays?  Ick.)

Oh, poo.  I just realized I’m going to lose Classic on her Mac.  Hmmm.  Maybe I’ll install SheepShaver.

So OS X 10.5 is now running fine on her Mac, but it’s awfully slow.  How is it that every OS is claimed to be faster than the previous one, but experience tells us the opposite?

I was chatting with my friend Erin, babbling about my theory that Avocados shouldn’t be considered a green vegetable because they’re just too delicious and fatty.

Erin said, “Yeah, I’ve always thought of avocados as ‘mayonnaise fruit.’”