Day: December 2, 2000

My .02 on the Leon County Hearing — I Just Want David Boies to Lose

Until the other day I didn’t really care who won in Florida, and I still don’t — I just want David Boies to lose. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t believe the more I watch this sniveling weasel in practice the more my sympathy for Microsoft increases (Boies was the lawyer responsible for the government’s case in the MS antitrust lawsuit). His mini-confrontation with Judge Charles Burton this afternoon really seemed to annoy Judge N. Sanders Sauls.

As for the case itself, Gore’s people can’t have felt good about things when Judge Sauls called Burton — the Bush campaign’s lead witness — “a great American” when he stepped off the stand. After watching how well Burton came across while describing how the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board determined the intent of voters, I would be very surprised if Gore prevailed in this trial.

The best Boies could do was whine that Burton had originally voted against doing a manual recount, only to have Judge Sauls seemingly share in Burton’s reasoning when Sauls seemed perplexed at what justification the Palm Beach County Canavassing Board had for doing a manual recount in the first place.

Yes!! Speedball 2100 for Playstation

I’d pretty much given up on the Playstation platform. I like the sports games, but most of the other games I’ve tried bore me. Then by accident the other day I read that Bitmap Brothers had recently released an update to one of the best games I’ve ever played, Speedball. Excellent.

Fortunately for me (but not for Bitmap) the game isn’t selling too well — already discounted to $9.95 at the local department store. So since late last night, I’ve been playing Speedball 2100, and the game still rocks.

Speedball was/is simply the best ripoff of one of the best scifi films of all time, Rollerball (yes, I’m serious about that). Two teams face off in an enclosed arena trying to put a metal ball through a goal. The game superficially resembles hockey, except there are no sticks and you can score points for severely injuring people on the other team. Of course you’ve also got power-ups to deal with and a few other ways of scoring, which aren’t really implemented well in this version for reasons I’ll get into in a bit.

It’s still one of the best implementations of a “future sport” for a home console that I’ve seen, but the update of Speedball does have a few problems.

First, although they are a lot better than the Sega Genesis/Amiga graphics of the original Speedball, the Speedball 2100 graphics are definitely subpar for a Playstation game. In addition the instruction manual is horrible (as are most Playstation game manuals, but this one really blows.)

The biggest problem, however, is that the game forces you to play two 90 second halves. I would have liked to have been able to alter this, as some of the alternative ways of scoring — there are a bank of targets that can be lit up as well as a nifty way to multiply your score — are too hard to carry out in only 90 seconds. A two and a half minute period would have allowed for more strategic games.

Also hardcore gamers, this game is probably way too easy. When I can get a good third of the way through a console game, there has to be something wrong (it took me weeks just to figure out NFL Blitz).

Still, if you can find it for $10 like I did, you won’t go wrong with Speedball 2100.