Today’s comic may or may not have been inspired by my recent reading of a highly-recommended late-1980s science fiction tome. Ahem.

Look: I understand the appeal both of creating and enjoying certain kinds of ambiguous non-endings in stories. I really do. They drive me absolutely batty, however. A fair-to-middling bit of storytelling redeems itself with a solid closing, and the best story crafting in the world amounts to diddly squat when the author leaves me actively regretting the loss of the previous few hours’ time spent with their characters. It’s that simple.

(This applies to filmed stories as well, of course.)

Every chosen career comes with its downsides, I suppose.

So, there’s a story behind this one.

Among the games which our nuclear family unit played back during the rugrats’ formative years were such classics as Diablo II, Heroes of Might & Magic (II, III, IV) and the Age of Empires/Mythology games. With the advent of Windows 7, a lot of older games don’t manage very well. “D2” has been patched to be fairly stable & playable, and we still crank that one up every now and then. (For all that Torchlight and Titan Quest are very good dungeon crawlers, Diablo II remains the best of its kind.) Heroes of Might & Magic doesn’t fare so well, but since the fifth game in that series suits our needs there’s not much concern about making the older games play well.

And then there are the Age games. Mythology doesn’t seem to need any tweaks at all, but there are times when you don’t want to play as the Egyptians, Norse, Greeks or Atlanteans… and you don’t feel like playing “race to make the first Titan,” which is all that the Titans expansion really is when you get right down to it. No, the best of the Age games really is Empires II with The Conquerors expansion.

Too bad it’s nigh-unplayable in Windows 7, especially 64-bit. If you can get it to run without crashing, what you usually end up with is Age Of Mars, because much of your planet is red rather than green. Yes, there are garish hacks that sort of work for some people… tabbing out and killing the Explorer.EXE process, for instance. However, salvation has arrived in the form of a little tray app called PallettestealerSuspender. I tested it rather thoroughly through the simple expedient of… playing an entire random-map game in one evening.

Ooops.

Before shooting & assembling this comic like I was supposed to do that night.

Double ooops.

And so, here we are… Mock if you must, but please be gentle.