Today is Memorial Day. It is also the 14th anniversary of Game Central. My annual tradition is to add some new content to celebrate another anniversary. Today, I am adding a couple of pages to the Dungeons & Dragons section. I decided to give the Character Graveyard its own dedicated page. Previously, I mentioned the Character Graveyard on Game Central's 7th anniversary. Since then, I discovered another trove of dead D&D character sheets. There were 80 additional characters, bringing the total to over 200. All of these characters are now listed on the new page. The second addition is a page for Cloudland, which was a D&D adventure from the early days of our gaming club.

After recent disappointments with some other games, I chose another one to play. Next up was a casual time management game, Airport Mania. I haven't played much in this genre but iner Dash">Diner Dash was my introduction to this type of game. My expectations were modest at best. I thought I would probably uninstall it after playing a handful of levels. Boy, was I wrong. It was quite addicting and a lot of fun. I completed the entire game, which comprised eight airports and over 80 stages. Various airplanes arrive on screen. It is your job to direct them to runways, terminals, and landing areas. They often need repairs and refueling as well. Bonuses are earned for early processing and color matching the airplanes to the terminals. The later levels can be hectic but it wasn't all that difficult once you get the hang of it.


Airport Mania's Awards Room - I got most of them

Given the large number of video games in my collection, it is unlikely I will ever get around to playing many of them. I have been tackling them in chronological order of their original release dates, more or less. That approach is usually fine but it is becoming more and more problematic. Unfortunately, compatibility problems are more frequent with older game titles. Recently, I ran into issues with a couple of games I wanted to play.

Europa Universalis III—I really looked forward to this one. I knew it was going to be complex, based on its reputation. That certainly turned out to be true. Unfortunately, the tutorial was horrible and did little to prepare me for the depth of the game. It was too short, too superficial, and too buggy to be of much help. I started the Grand Campaign anyway. I really wanted to play as France but thought it might be overwhelming. I decided to play as Portugal, thinking a smaller nation might be more manageable. Ultimately, it didn't matter. The game was too unstable. After way too many crashes, I pulled the plug on this one and uninstalled it. Hopefully, I will have more luck with Europa Universalis IV when I get around to playing it.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare—This was another game I eagerly anticipated. I thought the modern setting would be a nice change of pace from previous World War II first-person shooters I had played. I knew the game was no longer officially supported by Aspyr. They are only supporting 64-bit Mac games now and this was a 32-bit offering. Although the game installed fine, it refused to register my activation key. Perhaps they discontinued the license key server for this game. Oh well. It's time to pick another game to play.