End of vacation

This is a picture in late afternoon light of trees over one of the colliery lakes at Colliery Dam Park.

Today's the last day of a really great vacation; tomorrow afternoon, I fly back. We got in lots of walking, several nights of really good food (even if the restaurant that I was hoping to go to again tonight was closed for remodeling, I got to have the souvlaki earlier in the trip), and tons and tons of Minecraft. Which will sadly have to get short shrift for the next month or two, given all the other things I have going on and some restrictions around what systems I can play it on, but I'm looking forward to doing more.

As much as I love the game, I must say that this is exactly why I generally only game on consoles. I could originally run it on my laptop with only a few bugs and problems, but then 1.8 landed with lighting updates and the GL support in my laptop video card was no longer sufficient. I truly hate having to worry about or even think about this stuff. With an Xbox 360, you know that if you have a 360 and you buy a game for the 360, it will work. End of story. I don't like having to mess with computers when I want to play a game; it's a completely different mindset for me. (So here's hoping the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft does materialize.)

But, apart from that, Minecraft really is as good as all that. It's one of the more amazing games I've seen in terms of providing multiple ways to play it. And, something that I don't think is advertised nearly enough, there's a peaceful mode that disables all the combat and means you don't have to deal with the first-person shooter aspect of things, which is how I suspect I will always play the game.

I was planning on doing some things on-line during the vacation, but ended up taking an almost complete break (and a complete break from work apart from sorting mail). That was exactly what I needed.