Geek

(Note: If you’re not into gaming, you’ll perhaps find this post exceedingly boring; it’s not at all like most of my other Sys13 entries. You’ve been warned. If you aren’t a gamer geek, you might want to turn back - now! )

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been treated to some great gaming news, and some not so great gaming news.

The good news is that the next expansion pack to Civilization IV, Beyond the Sword, is coming along very nicely. It’s supposed to be released in July. The PC section of IGN has a nice write up about the additions here. There are a lot of new things in Beyond the Sword that I’m really looking forward to playing with. The Apostolic Palace looks quite interesting, letting you win a diplomatic victory way before you can build the United Nations. It also opens up a variety of other diplomacy “things” you can toy with. The corporations and colony stuff also sounds interesting. The colony feature, though, while it’s a bit more realistic, sounds like a huge trade off: basically say goodbye to your cities on other continents, while keeping access to the resources, so you can stop paying out the arse to maintain overseas cities. While having more income’s nice, I don’t know how I’m going to feel about basically “letting go” of my overseas holdings and letting an AI leader take over them.

I have to chuckle about one feature they’ve added, the espionage slider. This espionage slider thing is blatantly ripped off from Galactic Civilizations 2 and its expansion pack, Dark Avatar. The exact same espionage system is in GalCiv2. You can even sabotage buildings in GalCiv2, just like they’ve added in Beyond the Sword. Having said that, though, I’m glad they’ve put it in; while GalCiv2 is an alright game, Civilization IV is (in my opinion) leaps and bounds above its bound-in-space brethren. The espionage will be a great new layer of gameplay.

The bit of bad news is that Spore has been delayed again - sort of, anyway. While the information being passed around is a bit confusing, the fact of the matter is this: we aren’t going to see Spore anytime soon. It being a game that involves evolution, civilization building, space exploration, terraforming, war, and a ton of other open-ended goodies, this is a game that I really want to play. I don’t want to wait until 2008 or 2009 to play it. We wants it now, precious! If you’ve not watched a demonstration video of Spore in action, watch this one. It’s a good one.

A few days ago, I blogged about seeing this book over at Todd A.’s website. Through the power of OhioLINK, I now have a copy of it to read, a mere 3 days later. And the only time I had to go to the library was to pick up the book.

I realize this isn’t anything that new, but it occurred to me earlier just how amazing the system really is. Through my university student membership, I can go to OhioLINK and log in. Browse millions of books, articles, and other media. Find something I like, click Request, and that’s pretty much it. The next day the book is zipping through the state to the university I’m attending. When it arrives, I get an email letting me know I can come and pick it up.

I think that’s just exceptionally cool.

Finals week. Lots of studying going on. Luckily, all I have left now are history tests. Seeing as I absolutely love history, that isn’t much of a problem.

I finished watching Emancipation the other day, the episode of Stargate SG-1 that was bugging me. I bitched about it already here. After finishing Emancipation, I moved on to the next episode, the Broca Divide.

While the Broca Divide still had descendents of ancient peoples from earth speaking English, it didn’t bother me as much. I was too caught up in the interesting plot line to really care much about the language.

The Broca Divide episode brings up an interesting question. What if the alien species that we finally make contact with has built up an immunity to a disease over the centuries? A disease that we have absolutely no immunity to whatsoever? What if the entire population of earth dies like the Native Americans died when Europeans came to the North American continent, bringing disease with them? (By the way, yes, I realize that all of the Native Americans didn’t die to disease. Just a sizeable chunk of them. But the analogy serves its purpose well enough.)

That’d be a pretty crappy bit of luck, eh? Years and years, searching for other life in the universe, to be wiped out by, what to them, may be on par with the common cold.

Damn. That would suck.

Of course, it could go the other way. We could finally find other intelligent life in the universe, and give them our common cold, wiping them out. Not quite as dramatic as an all out invasion, is it?

“Man wipes out entire alien race by sneezing on them.”

Oh, and speaking of Stargate… it appears there’s no rush in me getting caught up. The SCI FI channel is not renewing Stargate SG-1 for an 11th season.

Technorati Tags: stargate, stargate_sg1, sf

I saw this over here: “Voyager 1 is now at the outer edge of our solar system, in an area called the heliosheath, the zone where the sun’s influence wanes. This region is the outer layer of the ‘bubble’ surrounding the sun, and no one knows how big this bubble actually is. Voyager 1 is literally venturing into the great unknown and is approaching interstellar space. Traveling at a speed of about one million miles per day, Voyager 1 could cross into interstellar space within the next 10 years.”

Here is the full article from Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

I think that’s just extremely cool. It seems like science fiction, but it’s not.

Technorati Tags: voyager, space, voyager1,