First...A Word About...

...Flickr.  The word I have reserved for that right now is "Annoyed".  Not terribly annoyed but annoyed nonetheless.  The reason being that the little app which allowed me to compose and post a blog entry from within Flickr is no more.  This feeling of annoyance isn't about blaming someone for the removal of that app.  It's about not having that option to share what I had been intending to share.  Any ways, enough of that.

The original title of this post was to be "(Yet Another) Game Which Ate My Brain".  The guilty game in this case being a veteran called "Simcity 4".  It's been ages since I've played any of the "Sim" titles.  I believe the last one I touched was "Simcity 2000".  I did a quick check and discovered it was released back in 1994.  What got me hooked this time was an e-mail from a game site I've been a customer of.  It heralded the arrival of a new Macintosh platform version of the game.  That within itself didn't catch my addition.  The $20 price tag did.  So I fired up the App Store on my Mac, purchased Simcity 4, downloaded it, started playing and upon realizing I had been playing it for a while found myself going to bed at 3 am.

What followed was a gaming project of sorts: I created a region in Simcity 4 and slowly went about building a series of interconnected cities.  At that time I was just happy enough playing the game in its original "off the shelf" form.  And then something happened...what it was I don't have any recollection of.

The gist of the past month or so I've spent on the game is not about playing it but about making it do strange and wonderful things.  Somehow I stumbled upon a modification to the game which I downloaded, installed and found to be quite neat.  Before long I found a few more and duly gave them a try.  What drove me onto the path of something less than sanity was a game modification featuring a train station...based on a train station in Japan.  The fact that the platform was elevated drove me to find out how to make it work in the game.  And that search opened a whole new can of worms.

It didn't take me long to find out what the missing piece was.  Figuring out how to get it working was a touch tricky but fortunately I found answers to my questions with little effort.  Simultaneously I started collecting game modifications created by Japanese players of the game.  The net result is that I have the game running in left hand and right hand driving mode on my machine.  That was accomplished by changing the region of an account I have on my Mac to Japan and its primary language to Japanese.  So now when I log onto my secondary account on my Mac, all the menus and system dialogues are in Japanese.  Some of it I can read, some of it I can guess at based on an understanding of kanji radicals and the rest is by association with English language counterparts.  The experience hasn't substantially increased my knowledge of Japanese but I do have a version of Simcity 4 loaded with Japanese buildings, vehicles and other flotsam.  Now I can play the game and watch cars drive on the left hand side of the road and trains run on the right hand side tracks.  Back in my coding days we would call that kind of bug, a "feature".