Gamer

You read that right. I am a video game junkie (who almost never plays video games). What? Yeah , its complicated as all simple things in my life seem to be.

I'll keep this brief, but heres how this story goes. I love to play video games. Car racing sims are my favorite by far. But Ive never been much of a gamer because it costs too much money (initial investment) and costs too much sleep. The sleep and getting nothing accomplished for 5 to 8 hours at a time is the real problem. As we all know after being dad and work I should be training, eating and sleeping. Not training, eating, eating, eating and then gaming then crawling into bed at 2 to 4am just in time for the alarm to go off and train some more. For reference I go to bed about 9:30 to 10 normally.

Another biog reason I dont game much is Ive never had a PC fast enough to make game play that much fun and finding a place to sit comfortably with the wheel and pedals is always a challenge. But mostly it was the video card and ram and processor that was the biggest set-back. or the lack of a video card in many cases.

So now I have a new dual core laptop with a nvidea GeForce OEM, but still fast, video card and 3gigs of ram. I loaded up an old 2004 F1 racing game I have and played it on the keyboard. That was fun. Then I recalled an old kart racing friend talking about this online racing sim called rFactor. Well that was a big mistake. A few years ago a buddy and I started racing Live For Speed which was also an online racing game. This ones great too!!

Out came the wheel and pedals and away goes the hours of the evening. If your a racing NUT by all means check out rFactor then we can join any number of racing leagues and race against real human beings, not those overly aggressive AI drivers the games come loaded with.

The car racing buffs wil appreciate this so bear with me if you get about as excited about car racing as watching grass grow!! After loading the CART Prologue cars (the days when cart was real (pre IRL) and exciting with amazing driving talent) and the best rendition of Mid-Ohio Ive ever seen or played I was going nuts when Mauricio Gugelmin passes me in the braking zone with brake rotors glowing red hot and the sound of the waste gates popping and the sound of those turbos!! Oh sweet music. Even Audrey recognized that sound from a few trips to see the CART races at Burke!!

Luckily the novelty wears off after a few weeks and I eventually get sick of pulling out the wheel and pedals and putting them away every evening and also wonder how I could find 5 hours a night to sit in one spot and basically veg out.

Of course i have been sleeping like crap for months and worse these last few weeks so I can always us that excuse. Well I am not sleeping anyways, might as well race!!