About a month ago, Berek and Pita got me a copy of the game City of Heroes for my birthday. Looks like a cool game, especially since I've been a bit of a comic book geek for a long time, and Berek and Pita seem to enjoy it.

At this point, I'm resigned to taking their word for it, because everything is conspiring against me ever playing the damn game for myself.

When I first tried to load it onto our desktop, one of the program components kept having issues (the updater, which automatically downloads patches and updates to the game before it starts up) and caused the program to shut down. Looking back on it now, I think it was because of some memory issues we were having (Vaio uses its partitions strangely), but I uninstalled it and re-installed it on Jen's old Vaio laptop. The installation seemed to go better than on the desktop, but I couldn't play the game because we didn't have a wireless network for the laptop's network card to work with.

That was fixed last weekend, when we bought a wireless router at Best Buy (at this moment, Jen and I are both online together in the comfort of our apartment for the first time - woo!). I finally got a chance to install the router this morning... no problems at all. The apartment is a wireless haven now.

So I ran City of Heroes again, and this time the updater kicked in. An hour and a half later, all the downloads are complete, and the game files have been updated. It asks me if I want to start playing. There's no "Hell yes!" button, so I press "continue" instead.

And I get a message saying the game can't be run on this computer, because the video drivers are too old and does not support the game. And it shuts down.

I spent another hour or so looking at both Intel's and Sony's websites, to see if I can download the newer drivers... and I can't. The chipset is too old of a version to work with the driver updates.

I want to poke someone in the eye with my thumb.

After this little fiasco, the two of us got ready and headed out to Santa Monica for some shopping and food. We're back now, futzing around on the computers. I need to pick up a cheap mouse and keyboard for this laptop... the touchpad and the laptop-sized keyboard are making me twitchy.