It has been a while since I heard the siren call of computer gaming – a good six months at least. Sure, I’ve played XGalaga and GoldStrike on and off over the past six months, but I haven’t really been gaming, just goofing off. About six months ago I picked up a 14 day trial for EVE Online, and got sucked into a world of space trading, pirate killing and time sinking. It was only a trial, and luckily (sort of), my personal laptop was my PC at work – and had been for almost 2 years at that point. Since I was always in Linux, and had VMWare etc running non-stop, rebooting in the middle of the day to play EVE wouldn’t have gone down well :)

Work finally supplied us with PCs late last year, and my laptop has been sitting at home, not doing much – other than using it once in a while downstairs on the wireless connection. This Saturday just gone, while working on someone’s PC, I decided to poke EVE again. I’d been reading the Ars Technica gaming forum thread on EVE, and it was just looking better and better. My laptop just about makes the cut for running the game – P4 1.7 with 640 MB RAM and a GeForce4 Go card (which NVidia’s drivers refuse to recognise!).
Today, I got my ship blown out from under me. Blah. And to add insult to injury, the in-game insurance company gave me an Ibis (very very very basic ship) and 1 mineral. I think the mineral must be the equivalent of air-freshener.

So I think I’ll sit tight in a hangar for a while, and train up some skills. One of them is going to take 20 days right now. Whee!