{"id":508,"date":"2003-03-19T06:47:00","date_gmt":"2003-03-19T13:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bibik.org\/blog\/?p=508"},"modified":"2003-03-19T06:47:00","modified_gmt":"2003-03-19T13:47:00","slug":"508","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/2003\/03\/19\/508\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve fallen in love with two older games lately:  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamespot.com\/ps2\/driving\/granturismo3aspec\/index.html\">Gran Turismo 3<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chessbase.com\/\">chess<\/a>.  Yeah, chess is just a wee bit older.<\/br><\/br><br \/>\n<br \/>Basically, Joe tossed GT3 into the PS2 earlier this week for the first time since we&#8217;ve owned it.  He has only played the rally races (since he hates all of the races on pavement).  Matt and him scrapped for awhile and I tossed my hat into the ring.  I was under the impression that to correctly navigate a turn you had to be turning the whole time.  In rally, this couldn&#8217;t be farther from the truth.  You turn well before the actual bend in the road and then power slide through almost every one.  I got smoked in those first few races.  After they had left, I gave the course a few more runs.  I just barely beat the course on &#8220;Easy&#8221; mode *then* I figured out turning.  Each run saw my times improving after each iteration.  Eventually, I was beating the CPU car by 10 seconds in &#8220;Hard&#8221; mode.  That is when I got hooked.<\/br><\/br><br \/>\n<br \/>GT3 is an extremely deep game.  Even the simplistic &#8220;Arcade&#8221; mode has 30+ tracks and too many cars for me to count.  The simulation mode has a depth I haven&#8217;t quite fathomed yet.  You start off with a meager amount of money and no cars.  My first car had a whopping 116 HP to start, which was pretty depressing since Zig had a car that was pushing 1048 HP.  You can customize your car, earn driving licenses (that allow you to enter the more difficult races), and obviously race.  I&#8217;ve just started, but I&#8217;m sure I am going to be hooked.<\/br><\/br><br \/>\n<br \/>On to chess.  For some reason, Zig decided that all of his programming buddies should have a contest.  He will write a basic GUI that allows people to plug-in two chess engines and have them go at it.  I doubt I will participate (since writing a chess engine would take hundreds of hours, at least), but that got chess on our minds.  After dinner (a Tuesday night tradition with the guys), Chris and I ran to the chess store at Briarwood and picked up a chess clock.  We went back to my apartment and played four games:  Chris versus Matt, Matt versus Joe, Joe versus myself and then Joe versus Chris.  None of the games ended with a checkmate since we were playing with the clock.  The first game gave 15 minutes per person then we pulled that down to 10 minutes per game when Joe was playing.  I just didn&#8217;t pay attention to the clock and I ran out of time with the game probably only half way through.  Speed chess just isn&#8217;t my thing, but I at least didn&#8217;t lose in less than 20 minutes total.<\/br><\/br><br \/>\n<br \/>Hopefully I stick with both of these games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve fallen in love with two older games lately: Gran Turismo 3 and chess. Yeah, chess is just a wee bit older. Basically, Joe tossed GT3 into the PS2 earlier this week for the first time since we&#8217;ve owned it. He has only played the rally races (since he hates all of the races on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}