The
Davis Cycle
The Davis Chapter
Contact Information:
Dave Eden, President
916-853-5956
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Fun and Games
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This is going to be a short report-but not because our August meeting had nothing worth reporting. It was a fine meeting; in fact, I'm keeping it short because I want to go back to playing a computer game that was featured there!
Our President, Dave Eden, demonstrated two of his favorite PC games. The first one is a very impressive science-fiction tank shoot-em-up called "Wild Metal Country," from DMA. This came free with a new PC that Dave recently acquired; a commercial version has just been released for sale.
The tank game was impressive, but I enjoyed seeing the second game even more and I bought it the next day. It's "Roller Coaster Tycoon," from MicroProse. This game lets you build and manage theme parks and it is great! You can recreate famous roller coasters and theme parks, or design your own. Every aspect of the theme park can be controlled, from planting topiary to assigning workers to sweep up the, um, "residue" from rides that are a little too aggressive. If you don't want to build your own parks, you can search the Web for "Roller Coaster Tycoon" to find sites where you can download individual rides or complete parks created by other gamers.
Games, but No Fun
I'm about to go back to designing and running theme parks, but I must mention a darker side to the PC game industry. According to Ed Foster's column in Infoworld (August 7, 2000, page 93), some PC games from Mattel Interactive installed a program that might affect your computer privacy. The titles include the Carmen Sandiego and Reader Rabbit games and the Print Shop application. When Mattel bought these from Broderbund and other game developers, for at least a short time they installed a program named DSSagent.exe which allegedly tried to contact a company Internet site periodically from your PC.
The reasons for the installation aren't too clear to me, but Mattel says that they stopped installing the agent because they take their customer concerns seriously.
The Winner
The meeting was a lot of fun; I'm glad that Dave Eden brought the games in. And Dale is probably pretty glad that he came in; he won our big door prize. Congratulations, Dale!
Coming Up
After the meeting, one of our members showed Dave and me some nice computer artwork that he created and printed on his own PC. He was a bit shy about showing it off to the entire group, so I'm not mentioning his name. We hope to feature him soon and have him explain how he produced the great photographic-quality prints that he showed us. Our September meeting will be in the usual meeting place on the usual day. Come on down!
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Tim Feldman
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