PC Game Space Race Victory

Retro Games We Love: Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space Edition

2010-11-12T20:33:00.000-07:00

Spring, 1957: How will you venture into the cosmos?

I recently discovered this website, where you can find a fantastic port of the classic strategy game Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space for modern Windows systems! Awesome. Kudos to the developers: Unlike playing BARIS in DosBOX, the sound and video for this version of the game are fully functional, which really improves the gameplay experience. If you have never played one of the most innovative and fresh strategy games ever created, now is a great time to give it a try!

Don't forget to read our previous post about BARIS!

Initial Thoughts on Civ V

2010-09-28T08:53:00.000-07:00

Civ V weekend has finally come (...and gone!)

Here are my initial thoughts on the game:

1) It took some time to adjust to the new interface, but overall the game-play is more straightforward and most of the annoying things, like Spies and Religions, are gone. The new "Policies" format was fun, it was more like a mini tech tree, or like RPG-style "leveling up" for your civ.

2) Many user-configurable features have been removed: such as the option to have single-character units, how to handle multiplayer dropouts, in-game clock in multiplayer, and other small tweaks that I enjoyed.

3) I like the new ability to see a small Wonder "info-graphic" upon completion of wonders in the mulitplayer game.

4) I also enjoyed the new City States, which provide your civ many benefits like culture or free units.

5) In mulitplayer, the animations of your units are disabled so they just jump from tile to tile. This was kind of disappointing; I hope they bring the animations back in a future patch.

6) There were some bugs. For example, the City State stautus is buggy and sometimes it will say they are angry even though you just friend-ed them.

7) Some "features" of the interface were frustrating: for example, the active unit will change after doing an action, but focus remains on the old one. I kept accidentally moving units that were offscreen to the wrong places and couldn't easily find them.

8) Another frustrating feature of multiplayer is that the game doesn't let you do things between multiplayer turns. It seems like it may only queue one action between turns, and I found myself repeatedly commanding units or cities to do something, only to find nothing was happening. In a mulitplayer game, it's nice to queue things between turns while waiting for others to finish.

I have yet to finish a game, but Civ V looks promising. In the meantime, I'm hoping for a patch to tweak the small game-play deficiencies.

A Timely Review of Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity

2010-09-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

Or: Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Strategy Gaming And Learn to Define Victory For Yourself

A Joint Review by Blood N' Glory Possum and Jraptor

Since Galactic Civilizations II doesn’t have a proper multiplayer module, we’ve been hunting for a good 4X sci-fi-themed space empire game. We bought the original Sins of a Solar Empire a while ago when it got phenomenal reviews, hoping that it would fill the multiplayer 4X void. At the time, we thought that the original Sins had lots of potential, but found the whole pirate aspect tedious (unlike, for example, the Antarans in Master of Orion II). We recently gave Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity an extensive “test drive” because it offers some gameplay improvements over the original game (like fortifications), as well as the ability to disable the pirates. Our comments here cover the Entrenchment game and not the Diplomacy add-on because we were never able to get that to load in multiplayer mode.

During install and multiplayer set up we encountered a surprising number of bugs, considering the maturity of this product (it has, after all, been on the market for some time). During install, three links are created for each of the three different versions of the game; however, only one of them actually worked. If you do manage to directly load each version of the game, you will have to reset the video and sound settings on the first load of each version. Fortunately, you can switch between versions of the game from the in-game menu; it basically closes and reloads the game into the selected mode. But at least this way, your video and sound settings are preserved.

When we tried to enter the multiplayer waiting room, we encountered errors about our game versions not matching even though we both had the latest updates. Checking the file system, one of us had an additional file in one directory. The only thing we can think of to explain this is one of us had installed the original Sins and then the Trinity add-on while the other only installed a virgin copy of the Trinity pack. It seems odd to us, however, that this should cause such an extreme error that could have been quietly resolved if the game merely synced our files. We were, ultimately, able to resolve the problem for the Entrenchment game by uninstalling the version that had the original Sins upgraded to Trinity and replacing it with a fresh install of just the Trinity pack. However, the Diplomacy game still gave us a “files don’t match” error and declined to let us play.

From the beginning, it was not obvious that the only way to win Sins: Trinity is through domination. No where in the game manual does it say how you actually “win” the game. We have divined from internet searches that the way to win is through total obliteration of all other factions. We also gather from internet searches that more win modes were added in for the “Diplomacy” expansion. However, since we were never able to win the game (or load the Diplomacy expansion), we still don’t really know. We suspect others have had the same problem since some websites suggested that “winning is how you define it for yourself.”

Overall, the gameplay was good. Managing the planets is simple when “auto-placement” is turned on. However, this will severely weaken your defenses because the algorithm that the game uses to place them is not at all good. It will lump them all together, or place them on the opposite side of the planet from where enemies would be expected to arrive. To the credit of the game creators, the manual doesn’t say that “auto-placement” will do desirable things.

We tried many strategies during gameplay that usually work in other strategy games. However, after 3 days and several restarts, we were, in the end, always completely overwhelmed by hundreds of enemy AI ships. The AI is aggressive and in our opinion unreasonably difficult even when on “Easy” mode. While we aren’t looking for a free lunch, we found this to seriously limit our enjoyment after 72 hours.

In particular, we found that the Vasari were vastly more powerful than either the TEC or the Advent. To test this theory, we played one game with only Vasari factions, figuring this would put us all on the same level playing field. We found that we did better this way, and our ships would occasionally survive a battle (as the TEC and Advent, our ships had an annoying tendency to explode after only a few seconds in combat). However, we were still completely unable to match the fleet production of the AI teams, and for hours we watched them produce 1 ship every 30 seconds, forming huge fleets of hundreds of ships. It’s possible that our game was so unbalanced because the Pirates were disabled; however, the game should be able to compensate for this.

As we lost planets, we also lost the ability to use the higher level technologies we had researched because we started loosing the labs needed to conduct and maintain high level research. So, as you get pushed back, you are put at an even further disadvantage, one that makes it impossible to recover -- your faction will effectively revert to a more primitive technological state in addition to the loss of economy as planets fall to the enemy. This severely limits the quality and quantity of ships you can produce and your ability to fend off attackers.

As soon as the AI smells weakness, it is relentless in your destruction. First, it will break all deals with you, then it will ignore your pleas for mercy, and finally it will taunt you as you’re crushed under the wheels of destruction. We tried the game on “Normal” mode first and then on “Easy”; in both cases we saw little difference in the game’s actual difficulty level. The AI in both modes still out-performed us economically and fleet-wise.

In general, we are big fans of Stardock; they treat their customers really well. The trend continues with Sins. We really appreciated how Stardock allows at 2 LAN players per copy of the game, which is great for multiplayer gaming on a home network. Sins also has truly reasonable system requirements - it can even run on a netbook! Unfortunately, this is not the game for you if you’re looking for a quick victory or any measurable victory at all; it lacks the perfect design balance of (for example) Rise of Nations. This game is designed to be difficult and is horribly unforgiving of even the tiniest mistake. The uncanny AI will know all your moves and move against you before you can recover. Think it won’t notice that you’ve moved your fleet to another planet for a few turns? Think again. Think those last 50 enemy ships you destroyed was the best they could do? Nope, wrong again. They’ll be sending a “little surprise for you” very soon, oh and they’ll taunt you about it, too.

The bottom line is that we’re still waiting for a great modern multiplayer sci-fi 4X game to build on what Galactic Civilizations II accomplished. Sins has a lot of good ideas, but it really doesn’t come together to make a compelling multiplayer experience.

Giving up on Colonization

2010-08-22T20:44:00.001-07:00

As a big fan of the original 1994 MicroProse classic Sid Meier's Colonization, I had high hopes for the new Civilization IV: Colonization standalone expansion pack. The Beyond the Sword expansion pack for Civilization IV added several nifty and much-desired new features, including random events, quests, some great scenarios (including the epic "Nextwar" mod, which comes vaguely-close-ish to being the "Longer Reach of History" Civ game I've yakked about in the past), and some new military units. However: Beyond the Sword had a big huge problem; namely, the 3.19 patch (which added some of the most desirable things, like switching off the hated espionage component) rendered the LAN multiplayer mode unplayable with dreaded "Out-of-sync" errors that inevitably occur. Oh, you can try to minimize the OOS errors by switching off random events and clearing your cache, but eventually during a long LAN game you will have an OOS error, and it's really aggravating. It's not really characteristic of Firaxis to leave a big atomic monster bug like this unpatched, so that was one of my earliest indications that Civ V was in the works - I figured that they must have been busy with something!

So, I was hoping that Civ IV: Colonization would be a much-needed return to form for Firaxis. Unfortunately, this plot below accurately sums up my experience playing the Colonization remake:

The game starts out promising enough. There is a small graphical upgrade from baseline Civ IV; the water looks especially good. The interface is close enough to Civ IV to be familiar, but still reminiscent of the original 1994 game. You settle in, open up your root beer, and dash across the Atlantic to the New World...

...and then the wheels fall off. This game has an insane amount of micromanagement. You have to manually adjust all of your colonists, and the population grows at a snail's pace. The economy of your settlements almost never gets going. Equipping and building military units is a tedious chore, and when the Revolution happens (if it happens at all, since Liberty Bells aren't that easy to make, either), the Royal Expeditionary Force is so large that it is impossible to beat - and this is on Chieftain mode!

Now, I'm usually the first person to stand up and say that complexity is not a bad thing. After all, Flight Simulator is one of my favorite games and in real life, colonizing the New World wasn't exactly a picnic. However, Civ IV: Colonization is just annoying and tedious. What a shame - the original game is a timeless classic, but new one just isn't as fun as the original. Unless I get really bored at some point in the future (which isn't likely, since I'm barely 1/8 of the way through Dragon Age: Origins and I have an unopened copy of Sins of a Solar Empire waiting in the wings) I probably won't ever try to play the Colonization remake again. I really hope that this isn't a preview to what Civ V is going to be like! I guess we will all find out on September 21st...

Spore Glory

2010-08-18T21:06:00.022-07:00

More beautiful Spore in-game art to inspire our readers (and maybe ourselves, too) to play more Spore. One of my favorite parts of the "Space" phase of the game is playing with the Earth-like terraforming tools. At first I thought (perhaps like you) that it would be a waste of time, but it really is fun and addictive. Filling your spaceship hold with your favorite plants and animals collected over the galaxy and then populating empty planets may seem pointless, and perhaps it is, for what do you have to gain? Nothing much really, other than a completely satisfying (if unexplainable) sense of self-satisfaction. Kind of like a work of art.

It was not, however, the terraforming tools that first got me playing Spore. What initially drew me in was the single-celled organism part of the game. I had never seen anything like it, and I really, really, really liked it. The world is beautiful. Some players have complained that this phase of the game has overly simplistic gameplay, and that might even be true *if* (and I stress if) I could ignore all the other awesome things about it -- like how much you can interact with your environment, the diversity of creatures, employing strategy and cunning to defeat your larger foes, the intuitive feel of the game, as well as the overall beauty of the environment. Any way you look at it, playing as a single-celled organism that keeps getting bigger while the world keeps getting smaller is just so cool!

More Awesomeness from LROC

2010-08-16T10:27:00.001-07:00

More awesomeness from the Moon! NASA's LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera) recently released this mosaic of Orientale Basin, a huge impact basin on the Moon that is 930 km across! The central floor is flooded with basaltic lava flows and so are some of the rings.

Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Read Full Article here: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/247-Orientale-Basin.html

Volcano on the Moon

2010-08-14T10:20:00.002-07:00

Shown here is part of a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera image (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University) of what are probably two small volcanoes on the Moon. The volcanoes are only ~1.5km in diameter each.

Read full article here: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/262-Volcanoes-in-Lacus-Mortis.html#extended

A Mantle of Ice on Mars?

2010-08-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

This image from HiRISE shows a "mantled" terrain where features of the landscape appear subdued. This might be due to a surface layer of water and carbon dioxide ice that varies seasonally or with changes in Mars' orbit.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

link to original article here: http://www.uahirise.org/PSP_002917_2175

A Bit of Asteroid Candy

2010-08-10T10:22:00.007-07:00

Perhaps old news now, but well worth a second (or first) look:

Asteroid Lutetia at Closest approach.

Image Credits: ESA 2010 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Link to original ESA article here: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM44DZOFBG_index_0.html

New crater on the Moon

2010-08-08T09:58:00.001-07:00

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team recently released this figure showing a new crater on the Moon the formed sometime in the last 38 years. They know it's that young because the crater wasn't there when Apollo 15 flew over the same location in 1971!

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Link to original article here: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/260-New-Impact-Crater-on-the-Moon!.html

How-to: Get 1024x768 back on an Eeepc 1005HA after a Windows 7 upgrade

2010-08-03T10:00:00.009-07:00

I love netbooks. They're like the USS Voyager - small, portable, and useful, and able to go to places where a full-sized notebook will be overkill. I can totally see why folks are buying the iPad in such huge numbers, but I don't think that tablets will ever completely replace the netbook; netbooks are just too useful. I think that both tablets and netbooks have a useful niche in the gizmonic hierarchy.

I got an Asus Eeepc 1005HA last fall, and I love it. It was a dramatic upgrade over my first netbook, a Dell Inspiron 910 with a tiny little 4GB solid-state drive, and I've grown to really love the small form factor, the extended battery life, and the nearly full-sized keyboard. I routinely take my 1005HA on trips where I can expect a four or more hours on an airplane instead of my larger notebook. Last week, I added another GB of RAM (bringing the total to 2 GB) and upgraded the OS to be Windows 7. I had held off upgrading from the OEM Windows XP because I was afraid that Windows 7 would be too much of a resource hog and cut into the battery life on my 1005HA, which running XP is a phenomenal 10+ hours. However, I really like Windows 7 and wanted to get all of my PCs running the latest and greatest version of the world's easiest to use and stable operating system, so I took the plunge. My fears were totally unjustified - the upgrade to Windows 7 on my 1005HA worked fantastically well, and is snappy and responsive, and the battery life seems to be basically the same.

I give Asustek gets a lot of credit for having outstanding Windows 7 support for their systems. I also upgraded my Dell XPS 1530 laptop to Windows 7 recently, and I have to say, Asus's Windows 7 support is much, much better. Dell never upgraded the wireless card drivers in the XPS 1500 line for Windows 7, so now my XPS laptop gets absolutely terrible wireless reception. On the other hand, Asus fully supports Windows 7 on the 1005HA and so the Windows 7 upgrade went incredibly smoothly. The one hiccup: The Windows XP video drivers for my Eeepc allowed you to select the 1024x768 screen resolution setting needed by such games as Galactic Civilization II, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and Civilization III. All of those games ran really well on the 1005HA...until I upgraded to Windows 7. The default Win7 video drivers for the 1005HA actually improve the video performance quite a bit for video playback and gaming, but they only allow either 800x600 or 1024x600 resolutions. Without that critical 1024x768 option, GalCiv2 won't even start, SMAC truncates the bottom 200 pixels, and CivIII does this annoying scrolling thing.

After some googling, I found some handy instructions for getting the higher resolution settings back. To my surprise, it turns out to be really easy to get the 1024x768 screen resolution back on the 1005HA after a Windows 7 upgrade. Here's how to do it*:

*(generic disclaimer: As with any "How-to's" on this blog, this info is provided as a general public service, and we aren't responsible for anything you do to your own computer. We do not endorse anything on websites linked from this blog, and anything you download from those sites, you do at your own risk. Also please note that this fix isn't guaranteed to work on all systems, and we're not experts on this sort of thing to begin with, so don't blame us if your computer goes **poof** because you followed any of the procedures you see here.)

1) Run the Windows Registry Editor (Run > regedit)

2) Back up your registry

3) Search for all values that match "Display1_DownScalingSupported" and change their values from "0" to "1". There were two matches for that variable in my system's registry - change them both.

4) Restart the system.

That ought to do it! You should have two new resolutions, 1024x768 and 1152x864. Now you can play GalCiv2, SMAC, and CivIII! They might be a little squished, but they'll run.

Changes in methane lakes on Titan

2010-08-02T21:35:00.005-07:00

A recent article in the New York Times highlighted that during the four years Cassini has been at Saturn, the level of liquid in the methane lakes of the southern hemisphere of Titan have dropped. The methane lakes were originally detected by radar instruments onboard the spacecraft. Because Cassini has had a unique opportunity to study the planet and it's moons over time, the changes can be linked to seasons on Titan.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech

Full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/science/space/27titan.html?_r=2

Defcon: Victory via Destruction

2010-06-15T21:16:00.003-07:00

Defcon: The game where you will use nukes and lots of 'em.
You get 2 points for every person killed and only -1 points for every person lost.
Overall a fun way to spend an hour with no unpleasant guilty aftertaste.

It takes a while to get used to how to control your units (I'm still not sure I have that figured out) and to figure out what each one does. The game does come with a manual, which is full of handy information and bonus tips on how to "survive" an actual nuclear attack. You know, just in case the computer doesn't think it's a game anymore ;)

While playing a 2-on-2 game, we discovered that Europe can kick some serious butt against Asia. Moscow and Leningrad didn't even know what hit 'em in the first strike. This screenshot shows the total destruction of Russia. Eastern Asia hung on until the end mainly because it takes a long time to get all the way around the top of Russia, and I couldn't get there before the victory timer expired. In this Old World, 2 team match (humans v. AI), Europe was easily most defensible continent with 67.8 million kills and 0 loses. 'Nuff said.

Orbiter 2010 is out!

2010-06-08T08:39:00.006-07:00

After 4 years, a new version of Orbiter has been released! Although all of the improvements look really nifty, I'm probably the most excited about the autoscripting functionality. I am also jazzed about the fact that there is a proper Windows installer now, vastly reducing the effort required to start virtually exploring the Solar System. I'm really looking forward to trying it out! Download it here!

Herschel Crater on Mimas of Saturn: Needs Pink Spice Geysers

2010-06-02T10:01:00.001-07:00

Check out this Astronomy Photo of the Day:

Herschel Crater on Mimas of Saturn

Q: Why is this giant crater on Mimas oddly colored?
A: Because the outer solar system is a fascinating place! Could use some pink spice geysers though.

Amazing sand dunes on Mars

2010-05-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

It's a Mars-filled weekend here at SRV. Check out this amazing HiRISE image of a sand dune inside a crater on Mars.
This image also appeared in a Discover Magazine online article: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/05/are-martian-gullies-formed-by-water-or-not/

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Full Image at: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_001440_1255

Martian polygons

2010-05-29T16:24:00.001-07:00

This HiRISE image shows polygonal ridges that may have originally been dunes. How they formed is still unknown. Link to full image: http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_017348_1910

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

A Few Small North American Impact Craters (Or: Fun with Google Earth)

2010-05-28T09:05:00.003-07:00

Several of our posts in the past here at Space Race Victory have had to do with Google Earth. One of many cool features you can see in Google Earth are impact craters. Here are just 3 of the smaller ones that can be found in North America. I wanted to look at impact craters worldwide, but it turns out that there are a lot of them, around 500 actually, with Google Earth aiding in the discovery of new ones every year. So, these will have to do for now.

Meteor Crater: One of the best studied and one of the first craters thought to be formed by meteorite impacts is Barringer's Meteor Crater in Arizona, USA. It is a small crater (~1 km in diameter) formed ~50,000 years ago (in the Pleistocene). It's shape is typical for small impactors and is bowl-shaped. The impactor was a metal (iron and nickel) meteorite ~50 m in diameter.

Excerpts from Wikipedia:
"In 1903 a mining engineer and businessman named Daniel Moreau Barringer suggested that the crater had been produced by the impact of a large iron-metallic meteorite.

Barringer's arguments [were] met with skepticism, as there was a general reluctance at the time to consider the role of meteorites in terrestrial geology. He persisted nonetheless and sought to bolster his theory by uncovering the remains of the meteorite. At the time of first discovery by Europeans, the surrounding plains were covered with about 30 tons of large oxidized iron chunks from the meteorite. This led Barringer to believe that the bulk of the impactor could still be found under the crater floor. As impact physics were poorly understood at the time, Barringer was unaware that the meteorite had in fact vaporized on impact. He spent 27 years trying to mine the crater and find metallic iron, drilling to a depth of 419 m (1,376 ft), but no significant deposit was ever found."

Upheaval Dome: located in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, USA. Upheaval dome was originally thought to be a salt upheaval dome but is now known to be the eroded core of a 5-km impact crater. Upheaval Dome was formed in the last 170 million years (Ma). The crater has been subjected to heavy erosion since its formation and is interrupted by stream-eroded canyons. Once 1-2 kilometers of material overlain the now-exposed-but-once-buried impact core.

Sierra Madre Crater: lies in western Texas, USA. Sierra Madre is a 13-km crater formed in the last 100 million years. It can be recognized as a circular mound of hills (dark green in the Google picture at the left) surrounded by a stream that follows the arch of the crater rim.

Some nice impact crater kml files for playing with can be found here: http://www.thinklemon.com/pages/ge/

How-to: Get Knights of the Old Republic Working in Windows 7

2010-05-25T14:12:00.002-07:00

In my opinion, Windows 7 is really the greatest, most intuitive, most responsive, and most fun to use operating system on the planet today. However, as great as Windows 7 is, the downside to upgrading to this superlative computing experience is that some older, legacy software titles do not function as expected. One of those titles is BioWare's 2003 epic Knights of the Old Republic. Recently, we here at SRV wanted to take a nostalgic tour through Knights of the Old Republic, but were stymied by the fact that it would only run for about 5 minutes of gameplay, then crash to the desktop. After much googling, we determined a set of steps that seems to get the software working under Windows 7 - or, at least we haven't had a problem yet, anyway*.
*(generic disclaimer: As with any "How-to's" on this blog, this info is provided as a general public service, and we aren't responsible for anything you do to your own computer. We do not endorse anything on websites linked from this blog, and anything you download from those sites, you do at your own risk. Also please note that this fix isn't guaranteed to work on all systems, and we're not experts on this sort of thing to begin with, so don't blame us if your computer goes **poof** because you followed any of the procedures you see here.)

We eventually found what we needed to know at this excellent comprehensive post over at the LucasArts forums. Here are the steps that we followed to get it working on our own systems:

Step 1: Apparently Windows 7 allows fractional screen refresh rates (i.e., 59.35 Hz) where previous versions of Windows forced those numbers to be integers (i.e., 59 or 60). So, you have to set your monitor refresh rate to be 60 Hz, the only setting that KOTOR recognizes. I know my monitor is rated to 70 Hz, so this isn't a problem for me, but your mileage may vary. Find the display properties tab and override so that the refresh rate is manually set to 60 Hz.

Step 2: Install KOTOR from the original installation disks. Note that I did not run the setup as administrator and I haven't had any problems. Some of the advice I saw on the internet suggested that you run the installation as administrator.

Step 3: Patch the game to 1.03, which adds new higher resolution display options as choices.

Step 4: Download the unofficial Vista/7 KOTOR fix and replace the mss32.dll file in the KOTOR directory with this unofficial!!! fix file.

Step 5: [Optional] Supposedly, installing a no-CD crack can help to keep the game from locking up. I didn't do that and it works fine, but I bring it up here out of completeness.

Step 6: In the main KOTOR directory, edit the swkotor.ini file. In the [graphics options] section, add a line:

Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1

Step 7: We currently have NVIDIA graphics systems here at SRV, so this step will obviously not help those with ATI graphics. You Radeon users are on your own at this point. However, NVIDIA users should open the NVIDIA control panel, select the 3D settings tab and click "add program". Select swkotor.exe. Set "Vertex Sync" to "Force on".

Step 8: Right click on SWKOTOR.exe. Select "Properties." On the compability tab, for the compatibility mode, select "Windows XP SP 3" Also check the following items on the compatibility tab: "Disable visual themes", "Disable desktop composition", and "Disable display scaling on High DPI systems".

Step 9: Make new shortcut to SWKOTOR.exe and use this new shortcut to start the game.

That should do it! We followed these steps and the game has been agreeably stable in Windows 7 64-bit.

On my soapbox: I do feel constrained to point out that KOTOR is still being sold as part of the "Star Wars: Greatest PC Hits" compilation in brick-and-mortar stores as well as a direct download from Steam, so I would humbly suggest to LucasArts that they might want to invest some resources in coming up with a Windows 7 patch for the game. If KOTOR had been "abandoned" and was no longer commercially available, then I would completely understand that people play it at their own risk on modern systems. However, I feel strongly that if something is available in the marketplace, vendors have a responsibility to the end-users to make things as easy as possible. This is especially true for PC Gaming, which, after all, is supposed to be, y'know, fun and whatnot. Generally, complicated 8-step procedures that involve twiddling with important system settings culled off the webbytubes isn't as fun as playing the game that you were looking forward to. Still, it's worth it to be able to play KOTOR again!

Martian glaciers

2010-05-19T18:29:00.002-07:00

This image from the HiRISE camera in orbit around Mars shows features on Mars that suggest the material has flowed as in terrestrial glaciers. The glacier is covered by dust and debris and looks darker than glaciers on Earth.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Link to full image: http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_017024_2230

Go buy Mass Effect 2. Now.

2010-05-08T17:50:00.007-07:00

Back in ye olden tymes, there were certain game companies that when they released a new game, I would just buy it without waiting a few months for the reviews in Computer Gaming World. MicroProse was one of these developers, along with Origin, LucasArts, and Sierra, too. With the Mass Effect series of games, BioWare has now joined their august ranks. Mass Effect is that good. Sure, regular readers of SRV know that I think that Knights of the Old Republic was, in addition to being the best Star Wars experience since the Timothy Zahn novels of the early 1990s, the best computer game since Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and easily the best computer game of the 2000s. But, as good as KOTOR was, it might have been a fluke. I had never paid attention to RPGs at all before, but KOTOR got me interested, pretty much singlehandedly. However, KOTOR was using someone else's IP, and an IP that had been decimated by the recent movies, at that. Plus, BioWare didn't develop the sequel, which was developed in a hurry and felt a little rushed. So, I thought that KOTOR might have been a fluke.

It wasn't a fluke. Go buy Mass Effect 2 right now. In fact, while you're at it, buy the original Mass Effect if you haven't already and start playing it as soon as you can.

The graphics are outstanding; the digital “acting” in particular (with the exception of the Illusive Man in ME2, who looks like a demented Muppet) is unparalleled. These are the most “cinematic” games since the Wing Commander games. The gameplay has tactical and strategic depth without overwhelming the player. The “interrupt” system for conversations is one of the most innovative things I've encountered in a RPG of this type. Tired of talking? Use a Renegade interrupt to just shoot the guy. Awesome.

Although I had actually bought the original Mass Effect in 2008, I didn't actually play it until late last year and I didn't finish it until last month. So, I got to finish the original ME, then import my Shepard character almost immediately into ME2. Bringing not just the character, but that character's decisions, and then making you live with them throughout the sequel, was a brilliant move by BioWare and the most innovative thing about the sequel. Not only does it really bring you into the story, but it has also made me want to go back to the original again after I finish playing ME2 for the first time and change some of the decisions that I made in order to see what would happen. That's just about the best and most entertaining way to increase the replayability of a game that I've seen, well, since the original Wing Commander's branching storyline.

Speaking of storyline: The Mass Effect universe is easily the best science fiction universe in gaming right now. These games are the best science fiction storytelling of the past ten years. The story is gripping – it really sucks you in like a good book. BioWare clearly put an extraordinary amount of time into producing this fully-realized universe populated by interesting (and in some cases, decidedly nonhuman) aliens. In all fairness, some of the ideas and themes you see in Mass Effect aren't terribly original. David Brin's Uplift books, in particular, which feature the plucky human heroes against a universe populated with an array of truly nonhuman aliens, appear to have been a major inspiration for BioWare (and are explicitly referenced by some of the characters). But, BioWare did an extraordinarily good job of putting all of the parts together, and it feels right. It hasn't been this much fun or interesting to explore the galaxy since Star Control II. In fact, the Mass Effect games are probably the closest thing we'll ever get to proper sequels to the first two Star Control games, although the ME universe lacks the zany humor of Star Control and is much more dark than the Star Control universe. That is actually pretty surprising, considering that the Earth in Star Control II got brutally subjugated and the whole point of Star Control II was preventing a genocide. But, I digress. The storyline of the Mass Effect games is incredibly compelling – it's pretty obvious that they sat down before the first game and really diagrammed the whole thing out, and the game is much better for it.

It wouldn't be an SRV review without the quibbles about ME2—very minor, in this case. The original game was much more plausible from a gameplay standpoint; I really liked the regenerating guns (with depleting health being the major game mechanic), and I think that the whole “thermal clip” thing in ME2 feels a little forced (the cover-based shooter mechanics, on the other hand, are fun). I like the concept of surveying planets, but the implementation gets tiresome rather quickly. Most importantly, I also appear to be the only person on the planet who really, really enjoyed driving the MAKO around on the alien worlds in the first game. Driving the MAKO was itself fun, but it was also a completely believable way to explore a planet. Well, they took the MAKO completely out in ME2, and I really miss the driving when I'm planetside – the “Hammerhead” expansion pack, while fun, just isn't the same. Finally, in some of the cutscenes, we see human characters exposed to vacuum for prolonged periods with nothing but breathing masks – d'oh! But these are minor quibbles indeed.

What BioWare has done with the Mass Effect games is absolutely incredible. I haven't had this much fun with a computer game in a very long time. I haven't even finished ME2 yet, but I can hardly wait to play it through it again – and pre-order Mass Effect 3.

Preparing to Journey to the Center of the Unknown Universe

2010-05-06T16:00:00.002-07:00

What I guess is the ultimate goal of the Spore Space Stage is to journey to the center of the unknown universe and make wondrous discoveries. With that goal in my creature's oddly-shaped mind, my current Spore strategy is to build up my automated defenses on my bloated empire with the hope that I can leave my carefully sculpted planets alone with the pirates long enough that I will have an empire to come back to. Also, I'm packing away the energy packs like a rabid squirrel.

Martian Megabreccia

2010-05-05T21:16:00.003-07:00

This is a new image of Mars showing the central part of a large impact crater on the surface. It has a rock texture called 'megabreccia' because the rock clasts are bigger than in normal breccias, which are formed when impacts break up the surface rocks. This type of rock had never been seen before HiRISE observed it. For a more technical description read the whole feature by the HiRISE camera team: http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_017257_2360

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

I just love all the new discoveries coming from all the current spacecraft on and around the planets and moons, it's so amazing that objects people have been observing for hundreds to thousands of years can still hold surprises! Who knows what we could find if we look even closer?!

Spore candy: It's the small things

2010-04-27T17:55:00.002-07:00

The best thing about Spore is the little added touches like this: a meteorite that I found while flying around a planet. Sure, if you've played Spore at all this is no surprise, but its one of the things that really makes this game great.

Retracing the Steps of Apollo 15

2010-04-26T14:56:00.003-07:00

From the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera: follow link to read full article.

Retracing the Steps of Apollo 15: Constellation Region of Interest

In this image you can see where astronauts (and the lunar rover) disturbed the lunar surface on Apollo 15 at Hadley Rille.

Image credit: [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Ash and Lightning Above an Icelandic Volcano

2010-04-22T20:53:00.002-07:00

Another Astronomy Picture of the Day link:

Ash and Lightning Above an Icelandic Volcano

A pretty pheonominal photo worth an extra click to view.

Saturn's Moons Dione and Titan from Cassini

2010-04-22T20:47:00.002-07:00

Astronomy photo of the day link:

Saturn's Moons Dione and Titan from Cassini

Q. What would it be like to see a sky with many moons?

A. Totally awesome, it'd be like playing Spore, but I'd still want my terraforming tools :)

Link to Cool Video of Volcanism on Io

2010-04-21T11:12:00.002-07:00

Neat image animation of a volcano erupting into space and debris falling back to Jupiter's Moon Io: http://www.planetary.org/image/tvashtar_051407_loop.gif

Springtime Avalanches on Mars

2010-04-20T10:37:00.003-07:00

Springtime dust avalanches on Mars caught in action with the HiRISE camera.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Original Posting: Springtime For Avalanches

Space potato

2010-04-19T14:14:00.001-07:00

Just for fun, a link to the Astronomy Picture of the Day from April 5:

Prometheus Remastered

Q: What does Saturn's shepherd moon Prometheus really look like?

A: It looks a lot like a giant, grey space potato. But still, a very dramatic pose.

SimCity for iPod update

2010-04-18T16:52:00.002-07:00

A quick (hardly exhaustive) internet search to follow up on my question about the maximum possible population limit in Sim City for iPod/iPhone has shown that the largest number floating on the surface of the internet is about 350,000.

Some handy tips for gameplay can be found here: http://www.iphonestrategygames.com/strategies/simcity-guide

Some cheats here (not that you'd want to use them, wink, wink): http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/01/13/simcity-for-iphone-cheats-tips-tricks/
And here: http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/03/07/simcity-for-the-iphone-%E2%80%93-more-cheats-tips-tricks/

I'll have to try again and see if I can beat 350,000!

Venus hotspot

2010-04-15T09:56:00.002-07:00

Hotspots on Venus detected with the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer on Venus Express may be active volcanoes. This would be a first for the terrestrial planets in the inner Solar System besides Earth.

Image credit: NASA/JPL

Funny Face Craters on Mars

2010-04-14T17:40:00.002-07:00

Not very scientific, but here are some Mars emoticons. Image taken with the HiRISE camera. The smiley and frowny features are explained as dunes on the floors of the craters.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona, more info at: http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_017020_1620

Saturn's PacMan

2010-04-13T18:09:00.002-07:00

The so-nicknamed PacMan on Saturn's moon Mimas imaged with Cassini is just temperature variations over the surface possibly due to different surface materials.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SWRI/SSI

Today's Candy (Copernicus Crater)

2010-04-13T11:21:00.002-07:00

This is a portion of a publically-released LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera) image of Copernicus crater.
It's a bit of the central peak, a central mountain that forms during the impact that formed the crater.

Follow link to view the whole image; I just grabbed a low res screencap from here: http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc/view_lroc/LRO-L-LROC-2-EDR-V1.0/M109365462RE

They've also released an Image of the Day about Copernicus crater here: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/?archives/160-Fresh-Copernican-Crater-.html

Space Race Victory Now Running Windows 7

2010-04-10T22:55:00.001-07:00

Space Race Victory has finally made the switch to 64-bit Windows 7 from 32-bit Vista! Now we have a whole 'nother 32 bits to play around with.

Do we like Windows 7? Yes, we do! It feels a whole lot better.

Why and how, you ask? I dunno, I reply. It has a certain ineffable, indescribably better quality of some kind, or at least a general feeling of overall improvement in a sort of qualitative way.

In function and design, Windows 7 is not really all that different from Vista, but yet maybe it is. The taskbar is really great. It seems to run faster, too. It's a bit more organized. Plus, it just looks nice. Now (the real question), do games run better?

Spore-Candy of the Day

2010-04-09T23:45:00.001-07:00

No words necessary. Just looking. (and drooling...)

SimCity for iPhone pop cap?

2010-04-09T23:32:00.003-07:00

Is there some sort of theoretical population limit for my small patch of land? I can't seem to top approximately 250,000 people. If this were any decent urban center, they would keep packing in there. I've let the game run on super-speed for many hours but the population never goes up. This requires some research...

New gaming addiction

2010-04-09T23:23:00.002-07:00

Quick, easy-to-play games for the iPod Touch have great appeal to me at the end of a long day.
Pictured is a sceencap from SimCity for the iPod/iPhone. You get a small patch of land to start with and skyscrappers soon follow ...

Revived?

2010-04-09T22:48:00.001-07:00

After 3 years, will this site be revived?
The suspense is heavy.

So much to blog about, so little time

2007-03-28T15:45:00.001-07:00

Our regular readers have probably noticed a marked decline in post quantity lately, as everyone here at SRV is currently struggling with a massive set of overlapping deadlines which have left very little time for even playing computer games, much less blogging! On the other hand, these same regular readers have probably also noticed that we've finally upgraded to the new version of Blogger, so you should expect some gradual changes through the spring and summer as we discover Blogger's new features.

Some quick news items of note:

The extremely exciting news that another expansion pack for Civilization IV entitled Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword is on the way. This pack will apparently include a number of general upgrades to the core gameplay. The Civilization Fanatics Forum (among others) has a more lengthy product description here. Although it appears like this pack won't address some of what we regard as the most glaring omissions from Civ IV (namely, the lack of "Future Tech" items like solar system space colonization and ocean floor resource development), all of the changes we've heard about are extremely welcome. As you might expect, we're the most excited about the new changes to the space race victory, which definitely seem like a return to the Civilization II style of space race victory.
A new version (0.62) of the timeless classic The Ur-Quan Masters (aka Star Control II) has been released, including support for multiplayer SuperMelee! Go download it! Still no word on whether Activision has greenlighted a proper sequel yet, though.

The 2007 Google Wishlist

2007-02-24T16:26:00.000-07:00

Well, it's a little late, and and somewhat repetitive (and really cliche!), but as other heavy users of Google products have done, I'd like to share my "Google Wish List" for 2007. Like many other Blogger users, I've been using Google products more and more over the past year. However, there are still some holes in their lineup; it would be really great if some of these got filled this year:

IMAP Support for Gmail. Well, actually, I'd settle for a properly implemented POP. It's impossible to access Gmail on multiple machines because of the idiosyncrasies of the Gmail POP support. Plus, importing old messages into Gmail is a real chore, and severely limits the utility of Gmail as an archiving tool. I have several thousand old email messages in several accounts that I would dearly love to consolidate into my Gmail account, but it's such a hassle to do this that I really shouldn't at the moment. They really should implement IMAP support posthaste, if for no other reason than AOL offers it for their accounts.
Google Talk/AIM integration. Google Talk is my favorite chat client, but with a few key exceptions the rest of my family and friends use AIM. This means that I need to keep switching back and forth between the two, which gets kind of tedious. When Google purchased a stake in AOL a few years back I thought that would address the problem, but we're two years in and there's still no sign of the promised GT/AIM integration. Hopefully it pops up sooner rather than later. Video chat support and group chat support for GT wouldn't hurt, either.
A To-Do List for GooCal. I'm a heavy user of Google Calendar, but great as GooCal is, it's missing that all-important project management tool, a To-do list/task manager. Some sort of integrated Gmail/GooCal to-do list and task manager would be a very useful thing. I use Lightning for that purpose now, but functionality built into GooCal that approximates MS Outlook's outstanding project management functions would be one of the most useful things since sliced bread.
Google Universe. Google Earth is quite possibly the coolest single piece of software on the planet. Standalone versions of Google Mars and Google Moon would not only be really cool, but I imagine they'd be useful for researchers and schools, too. I'll note here that NASA's great World Wind program currently includes cool components for the Moon, Mars, and the Jovian Moons, but I have a sneaky hunch that far more people would use the hypothetical Google-branded product. We need to get people back to thinking that the Moon and Mars are places they'd want to visit, not just ethereal lights in the sky, and Google Moon and Mars layers would help.
A Better Google Contacts. Although I use Google Contacts right now to organize my business and personal contacts, that service could use some massive improvements. Integrating across Gmail and GooCal would be a start; a standalone Plaxo-style service would be even better. Of course, a simple acknowledgement that not everyone on the contacts list should be on my GT buddy list would be a huge step forward.
Google Presenter. There are actually signs that some sort of Google equivalent to Openoffice Impress/Microsoft Powerpoint could be on the way. The sooner, the better.
Graphs in Google Spreadsheets. Ever since it came out, I've been a heavy user of Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It's a great application with a lot of different uses; it's especially great for archiving data and documents in a centralized location. Unfortunately, it's got a gaping hole in functionality: There isn't a charts component. I imagine the reason is that the Excel chart component is so feature-filled that making sure all Excel charts would work in a given file would be a real headache. However, including some basic chart functionality would be enormously useful, especially for collaborating.
Assorted Google Docs improvements. Google Docs is more useful currently than Google Spreadsheets. Having said that, the fact that your file size is limited to .5 MB is a real impediment, as most of the word processing files I generate are about 700 K (although if there's a lot of images that number can get monstrously huge). Expecting the Google Docs application to open 40MB TIF-laden files is unrealistic, but increasing the file size to 1 MB would make Google Docs a lot more useful--for me, anyway. Adding multiple column support and header-footer options wouldn't hurt, either. Including a bulk-upload tool for the spreadsheets would be another improvement that I hope happens soon.
Searching within Google Reader stories. Some sort of search function for Google Reader would be an enormously handy capability, especially when you're trying to find an interesting story that you forgot to flag.
Faster Google Desktop. I was an avid user of Google Desktop, but as useful as that program is, it is such a resource hog that I had to get rid of it. I hope that they eventually release a faster version of that program, which will be a lifesaver for those of us who won't be switching to Windows Vista anytime soon.

A Timely Review of SWAT 4

2007-02-06T03:42:00.003-07:00

I've never been a big fan of first-person shooters. I thought that Wolfenstein 3-D was pretty cool, but when the original Doom came out and garnered a whole bunch of critical praise, I honestly did not see what all of the hubbub was about. I purchased Doom, but did not especially like it that much. A friend of mine summed things up pretty well when he said "Doom is like Nintendo Duck Hunt with demons". I was positive that the whole FPS thing was a fad that would burn itself out; after all, 1993 was the same year that F-15 Strike Eagle III came out, followed closely by Wing Commander III, and between those games, Civilization, and Star Trek Judgment Rites, I was darn sure that the FPS craze (what was called in Ye Olden Tymes "Doom-style games") would end in short order.

Flash forward 13 years, and now it is more noteworthy when a game isn't a FPS. The popularity of FPS games has outright killed some genres, including adventure games, flight simulators, and space-combat games. Other genres like turn-based strategy are only now beginning to recover. I can honestly say that I really did not see that one coming; To me, FPS games disregard all of the advantages of the PC as a gaming platform, emphasizing mindless and linear action (shoot the monster, find the key, solve the jumping puzzle). So, up until 1997, I stubbornly resisted the FPS onslaught. Until, that is, the release of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. The original Rainbow Six and it's sequel Rogue Spear had it all: Incredible graphics; a visceral "you-are-there" atmosphere; one-shot, one-kill realism; a deep, engaging, and replayable single-person storyline; authentic weapons, tactics, and equipment; and fun multiplayer battles. Rainbow Six was the shooter that both sim and strategy gamers had been waiting for. It definitely opened my eyes to the possibilities of first-person shooters, and got me to grudgingly admit that maybe there was something to this whole FPS thing, after all. Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear are two of my all-time favorite games. As a died-in-the-wool Rainbow Six fan, I picked up R63:Raven Shield the day it was out. I enjoyed Raven Shield a great deal, but I felt that it was missing some of the spark that had been in the previous two games: It had a weaker storyline than the first two games, and continued the proud R6 tradition of the goofy AI that will just stand there as you pick them off, one by one.

Rainbow Six has produced four sequels and a host of expansion packs, as well as a spin-off series of sorts, Ghost Recon (another classic tactical FPS). The only realistic competitor from outside of UbiSoft has been the last two Sierra SWAT games, SWAT 3 and SWAT 4. The fourth installment of Sierra's SWAT series, SWAT 4, was released a little bit after Raven Shield, so at the time I didn't bother. However, subsequent Rainbow Six games have been critical flops, so when the critically acclaimed SWAT 4 showed up in the Wal-Mart bargain bin several months ago at a low-low price, I picked it up.
At first blush, SWAT 4 and Raven Shield are very, very similar. The first-person perspective and the interfaces are virtually identical. However, there are some key differences. First, there's no mission editor. You're given a sketchy map of your target zone, given some objectives (which tend to change, a nice touch), and sent in after the bad guys. This is probably more representative of how a real rapid-response SWAT team would operate, but the lack of R6-style gocodes especially is rather jarring. The weapons selection (featuring generic replacements for the H&K weapons ;)) seems to be fairly representative of nonlethal, light, and heavy weaponry. I didn't really miss Raven Shield's extensive collection of small arms, which in principle shouldn't be needed in a police situation anyway (although as a Stargate fan, I did miss the P90). Interestingly, to complete several of the missions you have to be carrying at least one nonlethal weapon (pepper-spray or a taser) to ensure suspect compliance and complete the mission. Second, I felt that although it was easier to issue your team commands in SWAT 4, it was a lot harder to control your other team members. You can't simply jump from teammate to teammate (which is more realistic, so I won't carp that much about it) but since there's no mission editor you can't use R6-style gocodes to control timing, which makes simultaneous entry kind of annoying. Third, each mission is completely random. Unlike the Rainbow Six series, the position of the AI opponents in single-player changes every time you run a mission. This small change vastly increases the replay value of the game and makes it much more interesting and realistic; on the other hand, I actually like the "practice makes perfect" approach taken by Rainbow Six; in R6, by the time you have a strategy that works, you really feel like you've accomplished something. The flip side of that statement is that, like Wing Commander, it's much easier to simply drop into a mission in SWAT 4 than it is in Raven Shield. Fourth, the AI in SWAT 4 is a vast improvement over Raven Shield's: AI opponents react to what happens around them, seek cover, and converge on your location. The superior AI is probably the biggest single reason to buy this game. Fifth, there's no overarching storyline. Although this was criticized by some reviewers, I felt that the completely unconnected stories were pretty representative of the kinds of missions that a real SWAT team would receive in an actual city and pretty realistic--supervillians are pretty rare things here in real life, after all.
SWAT 4 has a lot going for it: Beautiful graphics, tense missions enhanced by superior opponent AI, and a real sense of atmosphere; the inclusion of the 911 calls in the pre-mission briefings is a nice touch. I recommend it for all fans of of the tactical FPS genre. However, I personally feel that Rainbow Six 3 was a more entertaining game, and I can't help but wonder just how good R63 could have been if the enemy AI in R63 had been like SWAT 4's. I am now hoping that in the future there will be a R6 sequel that combines the strategic elements of R63 with the opponent AI of SWAT 4. Until that point, we'll just have to run through SWAT 4's missions again...

Happy Holidays!

2006-12-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

Happy holidays from all the folks here at SRV! Since we've been buried under a blizzard of work, expect intermittent posting for the next several weeks.

-BNGPossum

Discovery launches!

2006-12-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

There's nothing more awe-inspiring than the nighttime launch of a Space Shuttle.

Finally: A Civ IV Tech Tree Editor!

2006-11-21T18:28:00.001-07:00

One of the Civilization IV mods that I've been most interested in seeing has finally emerged--a Tech Tree Mod! I've been really looking forward to twiddling extensively with the tech tree. This should be interesting! One wonders if this could be a way for more Future Tech type technology, like solar power satellites and lunar Helium-3 mining. Congrats to TheLopez, the enterprising coder who put this together. The next item on the SRV wishlist is the Alpha Centauri mod, the development of which appears to have unfortunately stalled.

I was excited about Star Trek Legacy, until...

2006-11-07T04:48:00.001-07:00

...I saw the hardware requirements. Bethesda has released the official PC hardware requirements for Star Trek Legacy, and as I feared they're awfully darn steep. This is unfortunate, because the initial set of requirements that had been posted on Amazon.com were quite reasonable. This is a lousy decision on Bethesda's part, because it immediately puts the PC version of the game out of reach for most consumers (myself included). This kind of "hardware creep" is one of my pet peeves, not only because it's aggravating to me personally (I was really excited about Legacy prior to finding this out; now I've canceled my pre-order) but because it's the biggest single reason why consumers have been steadily leaving the PC as a gaming platform. I've never been even remotely interested in consoles, but I must admit that in recent years the increasing capability of console platforms (especially the Xbox 360) has made me actually consider switching over to some sort of console. Until manufacturers realize that 99.99% of us can't afford to buy new systems every three months, PC gaming will continue to decline.

Orbiter 2006: It's not just for fun...

2006-10-30T18:00:00.001-07:00

Last week, a group of NASA and industry engineers began a grassroots campaign for a new lunar architecture to supersede the NASA Ares I/V system that is currently being developed. To my admittedly untrained eyes, this new plan seems sensible and worthy of consideration. However, I wouldn't be mentioning this here at SRV unless I had noticed something very nifty in the photos section of the DIRECT website: These folks used Orbiter to do some of the spiffy strategic visualizations of their concept! That's pretty cool. It not only says a lot about how the proliferation of powerful personal computers are letting smaller groups do things that could previously only be done by government or large businesses, but it also says a lot about the fundamental usefulness of easily extensible software platforms like Orbiter.

Star Trek Turns 40

2006-10-09T01:36:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Star Trek celebrated its 40th Anniversary with a whimper, not a bang, although the surprise release of the long-overdue Star Trek Remastered was welcome news. Good thing that Star Trek Legacy is coming out soon, and it's actually looking quite promising if the recent CGW feature article is any indication. The designers continue to say all the right things, the screencaps look great, and grouping all five Star Trek incarnations with a D.C. Fontana-penned (writer of the famed TOS episode "Journey to Babel," as well as the Bridge Commander storyline) story could turn out pretty well. I've officially upgraded my status from "guardedly optimistic" to "cautiously hopeful." Although I'm on record as thinking that a new Star Trek single player RPG or adventure game should be made ASAP, when you throw in the possibility of getting to command your own crew in Star Trek Online, things just might be looking up in the world of Star Trek computer games. Although I'm worried that Legacy might not run on my little Inspiron, I'm a lot more excited about Legacy than I am about Star Trek XI. In fact, I think that the best Star Trek for the forseeable future is in all likelihood going to exist in computer game form. Why, you ask?

Since Enterprise was canceled and Nemesis failed at the box office, there's been all kinds of stories about what Star Trek needs in order to come back. This ignores a simple point: People won't spend time or pay money to watch awful stuff, even if it says Star Trek in the title. A prequel show actually could have been great, but Enterprise-as-aired was just a terrible show: The writing was horrible, none of the characters were memorable, the acting was wooden, and the series didn't just flaunt the established continuity, it barfed all over it. It wasn't until the fourth season that the show started to tell the kinds of respectful and interesting stories that the fans had been expecting, but by then nobody cared. I personally gave up on the show halfway through the second season. Now that I've seen some of the fourth season shows in syndication, I think that the show would still be on the air if it had started telling those stories right off the bat. Quality fourth season episodes nothwithstanding, Enterprise was sufficiently horrible that a "retcon" is in order, and I hope that future Trek producers will decide to ignore that it was ever produced (just like what happened to the Star Trek Animated Series).

The immediate cause of Nemesis failing was that it came out the week before The Two Towers. But the real reason was that like most films in the Internet era, the shooting script had leaked several months beforehand and it was pretty obvious that this movie was just a lame TNG version of The Wrath of Khan, so many fans choose to save their money and stay home. One of the problems that I had with it (besides the gaping plot holes and logic errors) was that the death of Data was was quite contrived and unnecessary from a dramatic standpoint. Mainly, though, my biggest problem with Nemesis was that it was the fourth TNG movie but still had the same friggin' plot as the first three: overblown villian vs. Our Heroes. Bah. This is Star Trek, not James Bond. The critics reached similar conclusions and really pounded Nemesis, which, combined with the LOTR thing, is probably why most casual Star Trek fans stayed home. I'm a big TNG fan so I went to see it anyway, despite my misgivings, largely because I'd seen every ST movie in a theater and didn't want to break the streak.

I read most of the reviews of the movie, and it was pretty obvious that (repetitive plotline aside) the critics had also gotten just as tired of the whole Star Trek concept; I remember one reviewer called Star Trek's characteristic optimism "grating" and others called the notion of space travel "silly". This is an important point that is utterly lost on many Star Trek fans : A society that doesn't find the idea of people exploring space to be inherently awesome will not find a show about people exploring space remotely interesting. Surprisingly, many modern Star Trek fans have forgotten this and couldn't care less about the real-world exploration of space; they care more about the character interaction and philosophy and so forth [Don't believe me? Head over to a Star Trek forum and you'll see a disturbingly high number of "the space program is a waste of money" posts. The irony is lost on them....]. It was the Apollo landings and the development of the Shuttle (and all of the hopes that went with it) that fueled the 1970s popularity of Star Trek (and, for that matter, Star Wars and Close Encounters). I think that it is telling that at the height of it's popularity (circa 1986 to 1992-ish) the Shuttles were flying regularly, we were on our way to the Moon and Mars, and Space Station Freedom was going to be finished by 1997. There was a lot more general excitement about our future in space. I think it's safe to conclude that if Star Trek is ever going to be as popular as it was even fifteen years ago, then society is going to have to be reprimed to acknowledge that human space development really is exciting and important. To that end, the best possible thing for Star Trek fans to do to "save" the show is to simply start doing their part by a) actually paying attention to what NASA and ESA and Energia and NewSpace companies are doing here in real life and b) writing letters supporting space exploration to Congress and newspapers, instead of starting useless "save-our-show" letter writing campaigns. Besides this obvious and important point, what other lessons can we learn from recent Star Trek?

It's about exploration, stupid. It's right up there in the opening credits, the most famous split infinitive in history and the phrase which really ought to be the NASA motto: "To boldly go where no man has gone before." Even TNG did very little boldly going. If you're on a starship exploring, then you should actually go find exciting stuff at frequent intervals. The last two movies have featured diplomatic negotiation as key plot points. Y-a-w-n. It can be done, and done well: Exhibit A is Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, any episode of which features more adventure and fun than any Star Trek produced in the 21st century. If you aren't floored by the innate coolness of what you're seeing you're not going to want to come back.
Continuity is not a problem. People stopped watching Enterprise in large part because it flat-out barfed on the established continuity. We're not talking about little dippy Nitpicker errors, either. I couldn't care less if in one episode the Enterprise can only go at warp 4.9 and in the next one, it's charging at warp 5.5. Bah. That's small-time. We're talking about big, gaping, monstrous problems: Emotional lying kung-fu Vulcans, a "primitive" starship that looks just like a TNG starship, first contact with the Klingons not causing a war, a heretofore unmentioned Xindi attack, and TNG stuff like holodecks, Borg, and photon torpedoes popping up in Season One. Would it really have been that hard to take a few minutes and look this stuff up in the Star Trek Encyclopedia? I didn't think so. Would the stories on Enterprise have suffered any from doing so? Well, they couldn't have gotten any worse, that's for sure.
Villians are overrated. Yes, The Wrath of Khan is everyone's favorite ST movie (except mine! I'm partial to The Motion Picture), and it happens to involve a larger-than-life villian with a powerful device that could be used as a weapon. Unfortunately, it has established a pattern that has proven almost impossible to escape. This plot device of a scenery-chewing villian who gets a Big Gun and threatens universal peace has now been the key story point of 8 of the 10 Star Trek movies, and it's completely worn out it's welcome. I think that it's quite telling that the absolute, hands down most popular ST movie is The Voyage Home, which made a tremendous amount of money and was a resounding popular and critical success (launching TNG in the process)--all without a scenery chewing villian.
It's gotta be fun. Star Trek at its best has a certain joie de vivre: it should be an optimistic, hopeful, and interesting adventure. Seeing the Enterprise in the first movie? Fun. The battle in the Mutara Nebula? Fun. The Voyage Home? Fun. Worf bounding through infinite parallel universes? Fun. Sisko and company visiting the original ship? Fun. Voyager almost getting home? Not fun. Overblown villian threating Earth with a particle-of-the week gun killing Data for no reason? Not fun. Watching Captain Archer meander his way through a tepid, poorly written, ill-conceived episode? Not, by any definition, fun.
You have to see the Enterprise. The Enterprise got really short shrift in the last four movies. All we got to see of the cool new ship was the bridge and a few lame rooms (the ship's library? who wants to see that, and why would you need one aboard a starship, anyway--don't they have Google Book Search in the future?). It wasn't any different or cooler than the things you ever saw on the series.
It's gotta be cool. The interior design of the ship in the Enterprise show was lousy, too: cramped, dank, and decidedly non-futuristic. I wouldn't want to be on that ship unless I had a big flashlight. Here in real life, the International Space Station has been designed to be open and airy to improve morale and prevent cluaustrophobia. The new ship has to be clean, bright and futuristic-looking if you want your audience to believe that you're in the future. This is one of the big problems with Battlestar Galactica: Everything on that show, even the big ship that can go faster-than-light, looks exactly like present-day stuff, which, frankly, is pretty distracting.
Quit reversing the polarity already. From about the 6th season of TNG on, the answer to nearly every problem has been reversing the polarity on some kind of subatomic particle. They never did that on the old series and things worked out fine. They tried really hard not to do this on Enterprise, but they just couldn't help themselves. Plus, it really wouldn't hurt to talk to a real scientist or engineer occasionally. Enterprise had some aneyurism-inducing scientific blunders.
Grit hurts your teeth. Ever since the success of Battlestar Galactica, I've heard a lot about how ST needs to be "gritty". They tried to make Enterprise gritty, and it was just annoying. Sweaty folks yelling at each other is not the only ingredient behind successful entertainment.
No Time for Time Travel. Ahh, the most overused plot device in Star Trek. Unfortunately, this one has some pedigree, because the old guys did it on the Original Series and again in The Voyage Home, with great success. Unfortunately, since that point time travel has been a major part of two more ST movies and countless episodes, and a ludicrous "Temporal Cold War" that culminated in goofy space Nazis was a big part of Enterprise. A completely mediocre Voyager episode-which I never saw, because I quit watching Voyager early on due to excessive lameness--even suggested that Starfleet would be flying "timeships" through the timeline by the 29th century. Enough already. Again, I point to the opening credits: "Space, the final frontier...." If we wanted to watch a show about time travel we'd watch Dr. Who.

In general, my overarching conclusion is that the "problem" with Star Trek stems more from a general lack of creativity and attention to detail, coupled with a society that does not currently value the adventure and breathtaking promise of space, and not from any inherent flaw with the concept or the established continuity.

So, having already said too much, what do I think about the eleventh movie? I think that a Battlestar Galactica-style reboot is a perfectly awful idea no matter how you look at it. The new BSG works well because the old BSG show had certain flaws, a small audience, and was only aired for one season, so there was nowhere to go but up. Star Trek, which has a rich 40-year history and has inspired billions of people, is another story. There's simply no reason why a movie that builds on all previous Star Trek which has come before can't be a huge commercial success; cherry-picking a few elements and disregarding the rest wouldn't really be Star Trek any longer. I'm also not a big fan of going back to the TOS era with new actors, especially with the TNG folks still around wanting to do more. Recasting the TOS actors was tried after Star Trek V and bombed horribly; the idea was a complete non-starter with the fans, so they made the successful Star Trek VI instead. On the other hand, the fan-produced New Voyages series is surprisingly good. Although I'm skeptical, I am forced to admit that a new TOS story with skilled younger actors in the Kirk, Spock, and McCoy roles (especially if Shatner and Nimoy appeared in a framing story), which didn't barf on the established canon, might work in principle if handled respectfully with the greatest of care. But since one the most credible rumors of the moment has Ben Affleck playing a young Captain Kirk, I feel safe concluding that for years to come, the best and most entertaining Star Trek is going to be played on PCs around the world. Star Trek was actually the basis of the first real computer game ever made; it is only fitting that computer games like Star Trek Legacy and Star Trek Online are carrying the torch of modern Trek.

Be sure to also read BNGPossum's earlier take on his favorite Star Trek computer games.

The First Orbiter 2006 Patch Is Out

2006-10-03T22:53:00.001-07:00

From Music of the Spheres comes news about the first patch for Orbiter 2006, which as usual includes a bunch of under-the-hood improvements and a spiffy new 3-d cockpit for the Space Shuttles. If you haven't downloaded the newest version and taken Orbiter for a test flight, now would be a great time.

The Real Star Control III: Update

2006-09-29T23:04:00.001-07:00

Some recent news on the Star Control front. First, the long-overdue news: the soon-to-be-departed Computer Gaming World finally inducted Star Control II into its Hall of Fame. Talk about sneaking one in at the last minute. It's 14 years late, but better late than never, I guess.

Second, the incomparable Pages of Now and Forever brings news from Toys for Bob, the current home of famous Star Control developers Fred Ford and Paul Reiche. Apparently, they have received approximately 3000 messages supporting a new sequel to Star Control II after their initial plea for support earlier this year, and they still want a new PC version of Star Control to be their next game.

There's still time sign the petition supporting a new Star Control here, show your support by emailing Toys for Bob at the address here, and of course play the best PC game ever made yourself by downloading the open-source Star Control II release The Ur-Quan Masters by from here.

The Great Linux Experiment

2006-09-22T19:47:00.001-07:00

I've been buried under a blizzard of paperwork and a dense overlapping tangle of immobile deadlines over the past few months. Haven't had much time for gaming, but you can't keep a Techno-Nerd Master down for long. Being an adventurous sort, I recently volunteered to be a Linux "Guinea Pig," meaning that I joined the Linux conversion pilot program at my place of business, and in the process evaluated several different versions of Linux. Why subject myself to the annoyance of switching operating systems, you ask? Well, for starters, I was mightily impressed with the Ubuntu partition I played around with earlier this year on my little Inspiron (That hard drive space has since been claimed by SWAT 4...more on that soon...). However, the big reason is that I've had a *lot* of problems with Windows XP: Boot sector problems, device driver conflicts, file association errors, slow restarts, firewall clogging, slow startups--you name a problem, and I've had it. Although I've always been a Microsoft user and in general like their products, I just have to say that Windows XP has been an awful computing experience. It's not like I'm manually editing the registry (although I've had to do that to correct problems...) or reconfiguring the hardware interrupts or overclocking or have a hard drive stuffed with viruses. WinRot is much more pervasive in XP, and it's just too darn easy for an average user doing average things to just destroy Windows XP to the point where you have to reformat and reinstall the operating system. Repeatedly. After the great annoyance of my last reformat a few months ago, I'm open to alternatives, at least for productivity tasks at work (you just can't replace Windows for gaming, so no home boxes yet). The capabilities of modern Linux environments are comparable to Windows systems, and the stability of Linux, especially when compared to a system beset with WinRot, is very appealing.

As part of the process, I was able to try several Linux distributions. I first tried the universally liked OpenSUSE 10.1. I sure was impressed by the nifty graphical installer, but it didn't actually work with my work computer, a vanilla Dell PC, circa 2002. For whatever reason the desktop environment wouldn't display on my monitor, and since answers weren't forthcoming quickly from the forums, I decided to stop twiddling with OpenSUSE and try something else.

I then set up Fedora Core 5, which was a vast improvement. I was tremendously impressed with the robust Fedora Core 5 distribution, and I would easily recommend it to someone seeking to try a version of Linux. Unfortunately, I couldn't get some software packages that I need to work with FC5, despite much twiddling.

At this point, setting up a Linux partition was beginning to seem like a whole lot more trouble than it was worth. I had been favorably impressed with Ubuntu Linux earlier this year, so I decided to give it another try for my work partition. Plus, Ubuntu recently released it's new 6.06 version, so I was eager to see what had been improved. The new Ubuntu 6.06 graphical setup screen was actually in my view a significant step backwards in terms of ease-of-use and capability from the Ubuntu 5.1 text-based setup, and wasn't nearly as easy to use as the OpenSUSE or FC5 setups. That's one of the significant Ubuntu 6.06 drawbacks, especially for a Linux newbie such as myself. On the other hand, once I had set up my partition space (thanks in no small part to the experience I gained setting up OpenSUSE and FC5; I doubt I would have been successful otherwise), the actual configuration of my desktop and the installation of the software packages that I need took about 20 minutes, and I was up and being productive shortly thereafter! A far cry from the time consuming hardware and software difficulties that I had encountered with OpenSUSE and FC5, which propelled Ubuntu 6.06 to victory in this particular contest. The precompiled Debian packages that you can access through the Ubuntu repositories are truly great, especially if you don't have the time to mess around with installing software. You can get more Ubuntu packages more conveniently and more quickly through the Ubuntu repositories than you can with either OpenSUSE and FC5. This ease-of-use is probably Ubuntu's greatest strength.

I then had to decide between the KDE (Kubuntu, pictured at left) and the GNOME (Ubuntu) desktops. Each one has its strong points; however, despite the fact that I appreciated the greater control and more options offered by the KDE desktop, I find that it is easier to get work done in the GNOME environment. I'll give KDE another shot in the future, but for right now I'm using a highly customized GNOME environment and liking it immensely. As I pointed out in my original Ubuntu review, I feel that the GNOME environment has significant advantages over the standard Windows environment.
I've been running the Ubuntu partition for almost two months now, and in general the experiment has been a success. Once you get it working, Ubuntu 6.06 is amazingly stable and the GNOME environment is really pleasant to use. I can create, open, and send PDF files; OpenOffice lets me open and edit MSOffice files easily without any problems so far; GIMP works fine for image processing tasks, and some of the more important customized software packages that I need have worked fine in Linux so far. Firefox has also proven its worth once again; its platform-neutrality coupled with the power of Google Browser Sync and Google Notebook (more on those later, too...) has significantly reduced the browser twiddle quotient. Ditto for Thunderbird, which remains my favorite e-mail client. Ubuntu 6.06 sports Thunderbird 1.5, a vast improvement over the Thunderbird 1.06 testing build that was available for the last Ubuntu version.
Having gone onto the record about how much I like it, I'll now go ahead and highlight a few of my bigger Ubuntu/Linux pet peeves from the perspective of a lifelong Windows user after a few months of constant use (no, that's not cliche at all...):

1) Hardware Support, Pt. I: It turned out to be relatively easy to set up Ubuntu to listen to most of the common audio and video formats, so that wasn't a problem. However, for whatever reason, the sound card drivers for my card don't work very well in Linux, although they work just fine for Windows XP. Whenever I try to listen to anything involving audio, the audio quality is terrible-it sounds like I'm listening through a waterfall with a front-end loader running in the background. Some more work there is definitely needed. I know it's sound-card specific to my machine because the Ubuntu partition on my laptop never had any problems at all with audio or video playback.
2) Evolution seems like a fine little e-mail client, but it's darn hard to configure properly. It also has a lot of trouble, for whatever reason, with our in-house email network (odd, because our email server is Linux-based). Kontact in KDE doesn't seem to have these problems, either. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to set up Thunderbird in Ubuntu, and I can use Firefox to access my Google Calendar, so I don't really need Evolution's functionality at the moment.
3) For any program not already in the Ubuntu repositories, installing it and setting it up is generally a real hassle. This was true with the other distributions that I tried. This is also where the only Linux system crashes that I've had thus far have occurred. Clearly, a better way of setting up new software is needed, especially to pull in the newbie contingent. The kinds of problems that I had would send a less-experienced user fleeing to the hills.

4) Both FC5 and OpenSUSE have fancy GRUB partition-selection frontends that easily handle the Windows XP partition if it exists, but Ubuntu 6.06 still has the text UI for the GRUB frontend, which is far less user friendly. The Ubuntu folks really, really need to fix this.

5) Legacy hardware support, Pt. II: I have a Radeon 7500 in my work desktop, which works just fine in Windows XP as a 3d platform using DirectX. The Linux 3-d picture is significantly murkier. Although Nvidia's Linux support is apparently pretty good, ATI's Linux support is terrible, and their drivers for Linux as provided in the Ubuntu distribution simply won't work with the 7500. This means software rendering aplenty, and for any application requiring 3-d acceleration I have to go back to Windows. [Update: ATI is apparently deleting all pre-9200 cards from its Â“officialÂ” Linux support]. This means that I have been unable to try out the vaunted Ubuntu 6.06 eye-candy.

6) This isn't really anyone's fault, just an observation: The ability to run just a few Windows applications in Linux would greatly reduce the occurrences of me having to shift back to Windows. Try as I might, however, I just can't get the open-source Wine emulator to work. I'll keep working on that, though. Some method of that would let me reliably run Windows applicationsÂ—not a lot of applications, just a few-- in Linux would be an immensely handy thing.

The hardware problems are the most aggravating of this particular set of problems, and will probably require the manufacturers to get more firmly onto the Linux bandwagon. The audio problem is annoying, for sure, but the lack of support for my Radeon card (the 7500 isn't that old, after all) is a serious issue.

Because there's some software packages that I require for work that aren't yet available for Linux, it's not a wholesale switchover and I'm going to maintain a Windows XP partition on my workstation that I switch back to on a regular basis. However, I've been genuinely surprised by how infrequently I've had to switch back to Windows. I generally only need to switch back about once a day, although I've gone for an entire week without having to switch back. I only switch over to Windows when it would be more efficient to work in Windows (meaning that the software I need doesn't work in Linux or equivalents aren't available). The fact that I can do so much using nothing but Linux applications is certainly impressive.

I Wish That More Game Companies Would Do Compilations

2006-09-13T03:12:00.000-07:00

From Gamespot via the Civ Fanatics Forum comes the welcome news that 2 K is releasing Windows XP versions of all four of the Microprose/Infocom/Atari/2K Civilization games (excluding the Activision Call to Power titles and the Civ IV:Warlords expansion) in a package along with a host of goodies, like DVDs and a Civilization card game. This is the prototypical Good Thing (although, I'm forced to point out , that both Sid Meier's Colonization and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri should by rights be in this compilation pack too...but I'll stop looking the gift horse in the mouth now). In a similar vein, EA recently released an XP/Vista compatible Command and Conquer compilation. I love when game companies do this, and I wish more game companies would release modern updates of their classic games. It shows they have a sense of and respect for history and that they're not afraid that the older games will be better than their big-budget but often inferior sequels. Off the top of my head, here's a quick list of other classic game series that really should be ported to Windows XP/Vista and released in compilations:

Wing Commander: Yeah, this one is obvious. Wing Commander can make a pretty good case for being the Best PC Game Ever, and the first four games are outright masterpieces in their own right. There was a Windows 95 port of Wing Commanders I, II, and III called The Kilrathi Saga, but it didn't sell well, and copies on eBay are prohibitively expensive. Origin kludged together a Win95 version of Wing IV, but I it didn't work very well. EA shortsightedly canceled further Wing Commander games, and the movie was a complete turkey, so this one might be a tough sell. But, there are lots of us with very, very fond memories of the Wing Commander of Ye Olde Tymes. If EA printed a Windows XP/Vista port of the six good Wing Commander games and their expansion packs, I guarantee you that it would sell really well--there's a lot of pent up demand out there for a sequel. The Wing Commander games are all masterpieces (well, maybe not the last one, but it's still pretty good). I can't imagine that it would take too many people to update the codebase, so the profit margin on this should be respectable.

Harpoon I and II: Well, with the on-again, off-again Harpoon 4 in a state of limbo, this would be the next best thing to a modern sequel. The first game is still one of the finest strategy games every produced and remains fun to play, if you're willing to fight with DosBOX. The expansion packs for the first game were hard to pick up at the time; there was something called the "Commander's Pack" which had the first two expansions but the last two were fairly hard to find. I never found the fourth one in a retail store near where I lived. Just a XP/Vista port of first game with all of the expansion packs would make a great compilation.

The Microprose Military Sims: This one is another no-brainer. Beginning with Sid Meier's classic F-15 Strike Eagle, Microprose produced a long and so far unequalled string of incredibly good military simulations, each one a classic: F-15 Strike Eagle, Silent Service, F-19 Stealth Fighter, M-1 Tank Platoon, Red Storm Rising, F-15 Strike Eagle II, Silent Service II, Knights of the Sky, F-117 Stealth Fighter 2.0, 1942: Pacific Air War, B-17 Flying Fortress, Gunship 2000, F-15 Strike Eagle III, F-14 Fleet Defender, and M-1 Tank Platoon II [I'm not including Falcon 4.0 on the list because an update apparently is, in fact, on the way.] Microprose is no more, but if I recall correctly Firaxis actively acquired the rights to most of these titles last year, so at least some hope exists. These games are truly great examples of fun, playable, yet accurate combat simulations, a type of game which is sorely missed at the moment (Jane's USAF was the last good example of a game of this type, and that needs a Windows XP update, too, now that I'm thinking of it...).

The Dune Games: This one is another no-brainer. Dune and Dune II were groundbreaking games; Dune 2000 and Emperor were also both pretty fun. A compilation would make another great XP/Vista port, especially with the recent resurgence of Dune popularity (two new miniseries, new books). Dune 2000 runs very well on XP, but none of the rest of them do. An XP/Vista port of the original Dune, especially, would be a great thing.

SimCities: Again, this one has been done, but I imagine we might see something like this in the run-up to Spore. An XP/Vista friendly compilation of all of the SimCity games, plus their expansion packs, would be both handy and fun.

Star Fleet: I'm not sure who owns the rights to these games, but Star Fleet I, Star Fleet II, and the space ground-war sequel Star Legions were all great strategy games in the 1980s from Interstel. Probably will never happen, but I'll put them on this list anyway.

LucasArts Sims and Adventures: Between the Larry Holland series of flight simulators (e.g., Battlehawks and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe) and the classic LucasArts SCUMM adventures (Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the timeless masterpiece of The Dig) LucasArts has released some great games over the years. It would be great to see a big Windows XP/Vista-friendly reissue of the LucasArts Archives compilation of some of the more notable ones, like X-Wing, SWoTL, and Fate of Atlantis.

There's a few others that would rightfully be on this list, but enterprising fans have taken the initiative: Tierra Games has been updating the classic Sierra Adventures and letting folks download them for free (good for them!) and Toys for Bob has let the fan community port the timeless Star Control II to Windows XP as The Ur-Quan Masters. Here's hoping that the EA C & C compilation and the Firaxis Civilization Chronicles sell well enough to begat more releases of this sort.

Be sure to also check out Juliraptor's quick review of Civilization IV here; BNGPossum's comprehensive three-part review of Civilization IV ( here, here, and here); our report of a 3-day Civ IV multiplayer match; Juliraptor's discussion of how to mod Civ IV; and BNGPossum's discussion of other games he'd like to see remade.

Image credit: Firaxis via Gamespot.

Bork

A Timely Review of Galactic Civilizations II

2006-08-06T13:38:00.001-07:00

While strolling through Wal-Mart recently, I found a heavily discounted copy of the Galactic Civilizations II:The Dread Lords Collector's Edition hiding behind a stack of copies of Ford GT Racing Unlimited (bleech). Since GalCiv II has received a bundle of awards, including an Editor's Choice award from Computer Gaming World and GameSpot, I naturally snapped it up.

As I've discussed previously, I'm a big fan the space strategy 4X genre. So, I had purchased the first GalCiv game with high hopes, especially since it got some really glowing reviews. Although it had some good ideas (like the dual military/social production queues, something which really, really, really needs to find its way into Civ IV) and the AI was quite good, for a variety of reasons (too many to go into detail here) I really didn't think the game was that fun. Ultimately, Master of Orion II found its way back onto my hard drive, and I was kind of leery of GalCiv II.

So, I'll just get this out of the way right off the bat: I played both games extensively, and GalCiv II is a dramatic improvement from the first game. It's a fun, highly balanced and replayable strategy game.

The galaxy that you play in is completely customizable; you can have the star systems clustered into arms like a spiral galaxy or more evenly distributed (MOO-style) in a globular cluster type formation, and you have a lot of control over the attributes of your civilization and the strength of your opponents. I liked being able to set how your opponents felt about you. I'll note at this point that I've only played it in sandbox mode and haven't tried the story-drive campaign mode yet.

However, the biggest single improvement is the fully scalable 3-D window showing the disposition of colonies, ships, fleets, and starbases in your galaxy. Amazingly, it's completely functional while zoomed all the way out--there are well-thought out symbols that instantly indicate what you're looking at (it looks a lot like the tactical display in Harpoon, actually). But when you zoom in, you see beautifully textured planets, plus wonderfully rendered starships and starbases with nebulae and stars in a nicely layered background. You can actually see continents on Earth, for example, and there's even a little Moon that's in orbit around the Earth, passing into and out of the shadow. The transitions between the "Harpoon view" and the "eye candy view" are spotless. It's gorgeous, and although it's 3-d, it works really well even on my little Inspiron. In fact, the hardware requirements for GalCiv II are completely reasonable; the game runs very well on my little Inspiron, although it has had some trouble in late-game situations in Huge galaxies with abundant habitable worlds [Quick side note: The completely reasonable hardware requirements of GalCiv II, which like Civ IV is an epic turn-based strategy game running a 3-d engine, shows pretty definitively how absolutely ludicrous Civ IV's hardware requirements are....].

Which brings us to the starship designer, which is almost a game unto itself. You can spend hours twiddling with all of the various configurations available to you. This part is actually very similar to Simon & Schuster's Star Trek Starship Creator: You pick a hull, then you select the components to kit it out and attach them to hardpoints on the hull. The Collector's Edition includes a lot of new components for the ships, and endless configurations are possible. I managed to make a reasonably decent approximations of both an Imperial Star Destroyer and the USS Enterprise, which was neat. Definitely a highlight of the game. You can watch the battles that unfold in 3-d mode, but unfortunately the rumored 3-d tactical combat mode was removed from the game in preproduction. I gather it might appear in GalCiv III.

The planetary management view has been significantly improved as well: Unlike other 4X games like GalCiv, MoO II, Birth of the Federation, or Star Wars Rebellion, where you're essentially building Civ-style cities in space, the planets in GalCiv II feel, like, well, planets. You see a nice randomly generated texture map of the planet (which matches what you see in the big 3-d view) and you select where you want to put individual improvements. Certain tiles have special bonuses, such as Precursor ruins (A nice nod to Star Control! In fact, like GalCiv, this game is full of tongue-in-cheek references to other works of science-fiction) relics or fertile farmland. The dual production queues are thankfully still present.

Managing your civilization is also very well done: You can instantly determine the status of your colonies using the spiffy "Colony Management" screen (which would be an excellent template for replacing the useless city advisor mode in Civ IV, hint, hint...). You can also issue blanket orders for unit production using the "colony governor" screen, which is handy.

Diplomacy features a Civ III- style diplomatic table with a complete range of bartering options; not to sound like a broken record, but this is the diplomatic interface that Civ IV should have had. The AIs are smart, and present a challenge even on the lower difficulty levels.

I'll also give Stardock a special kudos for their excellent support of the game; they issue frequent patches. Plus, the game isn't protected by any sort of dubious, StarForce protection scheme that inhibits CD player functionality or causes the computer to crash, and registering with the serial number is optional (although it's worth it, because you get access to some nifty goodies). It's a refreshing change that I hope other developers emulate.

There are still some problems with the game, although for the most part they don't interfere with the fun to a large extent. First, although there's a colony governor screen, it's just used to issue blanket commands to all of your colonies. GalCiv had a MoO-II style system of installing leaders of colonies to manage production which is completely absent (or just buried enough that I couldn't find it) from GalCiv II. As is typical for 4X games, without some system of autonomously running a most of the colonies the late game can get kind of twiddle-intensive.

Second, managing colony and constructor ships is still twiddle intensive; the hotlink that supposed to show you the list of your colony and constructor ships doesn't do much, so it's hard to see where your colony and constructor ships are, not to mention where they're going.

Third, I was personally quite annoyed that they divided the functions of the starbases into four separate classes (military, influence, mining and economic) starbases, each of which has their own improvement tree requiring the use of constructor ships. This is the only case of a regression from GalCiv: Starbases just aren't fun anymore. I can see why the designers did this (in GalCiv, the planets were virtually secondary to the powerful starbases), and I don't necessarily disagree with their reasoning. But, after trying it, having four separate kinds of Starbase doesn't actually improve the game. It only adds more twiddling. My solution: I only built the mining and influence starbases.

Fourth, there's no way to upgrade classes of starship directly from the upgrade screen (at least, I couldn't find it). Instead, you have to find an individual from the class of ship to be upgraded, double click on it, hit upgrade, then check off "upgrade all ships in class" and hope you have enough money to cover the bill. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that there's an upgrade function, but wouldn't it have made more sense to just let you do a blanket upgrade from the shipyard?

Fifth, there's currently no multiplayer mode. I gather that originally this had been scheduled to be added in a patch, and then was dropped entirely. Here's hoping it shows up in GalCiv III.

Finally, and most importantly, the technology tree is an absolute mess. You hear frequently (and incorrectly) that SMAC had an incomprehensible tech tree. That's absolutely untrue, but I suspect that even the most die hard hater-of-SMAC would freely admit that GalCiv II's tech tree (despite the big poster that comes with the Collector's edition of the game) really is incomprehensible. The names (like Laser 3 and Shields II) really don't tell you much about the technology you're researching, and the entries describing the techs do a perfectly awful job of both describing the technology and illustrating what you'll get out of the research. There's no Civ IV-style "Galactopedia" (there is a user mod that adds something like a Galactopedia, but you have to Alt-Tab out and the game isn't fond of Alt-Tabbing). They really need to simplify the tech tree, too: The one time thus far I researched the ultimate technology victory, I was only halfway through the tech tree for the weapons and the shields! This is one area where GalCiv II really could use some improvement, quickly. Fortunately, a Galactopedia functionality is on the list of things that will be included in the expansion pack.

However, when you consider the total package of GalCiv II, this is easily the best space conquest game since Master of Orion II. In many respects, it's better than last year's Civilization IV, and it's my favorite strategy game of this year thus far. I heartily encourage both fans of 4X games and strategy gamers in general to run out and grab a copy, if they haven't already. You won't regret it.

Your government, working for you

2006-07-02T14:06:00.000-07:00

The FCC has ruled that any VoIP provider has to apply the Universal Service Fee. The implications of this ruling are pretty far reaching. Off the top of my head, what about Teamspeak or Xfire? When I play UT2004 with my friends, is it now going to cost money? What about open-source products like GAIM? It's going to be impossible to enforce for products like that. Plus, what about the built in gaming voice-chat client that's supposed to be in Windows Vista? Any way you look at it, this is a dumb decision that's going to be nearly impossible to enforce.

The Best Space Exploration PC Games

2006-06-28T03:48:00.000-07:00

We have a big solar system, and as near as we can tell, we have it all to ourselves. So, there's lots of room for adventures both big and small, and you don't need warp drives, stargates, or lightsabers. As you might expect, I'm a big fan of what Clark Lindsey over at HobbySpace (which is the best space site on the Internet, IMHO) calls "Solar Sci-Fi": science fiction set in the context of near term solar system exploration and settlement. Unfortunately, there really haven't been that many games about real-world space exploration and development. Nevertheless, there have been some great space exploration titles released over the past two decades. Let's rocket down memory lane to see my favorites. I'll confine this list to PC games, not just nifty computer toys like the Virtual International Space Station. That's a topic for a another post. There's also a comprehensive list of space-related software over at HobbySpace, which is definitely worth looking at if you're interested in finding other software packages of this nature. Plus, there's a chance that I missed a good one-if I did, let me know!

Project Space Station: (abandonware; available from the Home of the Underdogs)

Modern updates: Shorthike (shareware, limited demo available)

This was the computer game that I wanted to play back in 1984 (well, besides Star Raiders). It was available for both the Apple II and the IBM-PC AT (I played it at a friend's house) platform. Of course, I didn't replace my trusty Atari 800 with a PC AT until 1990, so I missed out. Thanks to the Home of the Underdogs and DOSBox, however, I've had a chance to try this title again.

Project: Space Station is still hailed as one of the best space exploration games ever produced. It succeeds because it distills what is a very complex enterprise - the design, construction, and operation of a space station in low earth orbit - down to the fun essentials. It was designed by Larry Holland (of SWoTL, X-Wing, and Bridge Commander fame) and displays the same characteristic attention to detail displayed in those later titles. Holland received a lot of help and support from NASA, and it shows.

The player is the executive in charge of managing the construction of NASA's first permanent space station in low earth orbit. The player must hire astronauts, select a space station design, purchase station components, manage a budget, and select which experiments to perform. You have simplified options that accurately reflect real-world choices. Never has managing a large multibillion dollar project been so fun! The goal, of course, is to eventually build up a large orbital outpost that pays for itself with useful research, on-orbit capabilities, and profitable discoveries.

In addition to managing the project, the player is also placed in control of the STS missions to the station. You have to guide your Orbiter to the proper orbit, correctly assemble the station components, guide the offloading of supplies, and then return the orbiter safely to earth. It sounds complicated, but it's actually a lot of fun. This really isn't a flightsim (not that flight sims aren't fun!), but more of a simplified representation of things that in real life are pretty hard to do successfully. The closest analog that I can think of to these parts of the game is actually Star Control's marvelously fun overhead space combat and movement interface. When you put it together, you have a fun-filled but downright educational game that is a blast to play. This is the way that the last twenty years in space should have happened. It is a real shame that the ISS is just a pale shadow of these ambitious 1980s plans for the Free World's first permanent space outpost. If things had worked out just a little differently, it really would have been like Project: Space Station.

You can get the game working easily using the excellent Dfend/DOSBox combo, so I would heartily encourage everyone to download and try this gem.

Nobody has ever tried to do a modern version of this game, although ShortHike (formerly Space Station Manager) is a good, SimCity style shareware space station construction program where you get to design, construct, and manage an orbital outpost with really snazzy 3-d graphics. You can download the demo for ShortHike here.

Shuttle: (Abandonware; Available from the Home of the Underdogs)

Modern Update: S3

I'm actually quite surprised that none of the big simulation firms (Dynamix, Jane's, Microsoft, etc.) ever tried to do a Space Shuttle simulator, because the Shuttle is a great topic for a computer game. One probably would have happened eventually if the Flightsim bubble hadn't burst (Dynamix, MicroProse, and Jane's are no more, and Microsoft seems to be abandoning the PC as a gaming platform) in the late nineties. Shuttle: The Space Flight Simulator, a 1992 offering from Virgin Games, is to my knowledge the last full, commercially available PC game about the Space Shuttle. It did an amazing job of distilling the most complex machine ever constructed to 3 1.2 MB floppy disks. It was a little skimpy on the tutorials, but it did offer a mode that guided you to the proper switches on the command deck, handy for those of us with out four years of astronaut training. It also offered a somewhat-confusing-but-OK- when-you-got-used-to-it "Time Skip" feature that let you skip to the next mission event, so you weren't expected to do the mission in real time. In principle, you could even do an automated skip to the end of the mission, but the landings (which, when you're flying the world's heaviest glider hypersonically at a trajectory seven times steeper than a commercial jetliner's, are quite challenging) had to be done manually.

Of course, the nuts and bolts of any simulation game are the missions. You followed a linear mission track, starting with a 1977 Approach and Landing Test, then proceeding to the orbital flight tests, then satellite deployment, EVAs, Hubble deployment, satellite rescue, MMU testing, spy sat missions, and Space Station construction. Each mission was interesting, but the on-orbit space operations (doing EVAs and using the Canadarm) were fascinating.

I'd love to say that I completed every mission, but I didn't. I got up to the Hubble deployment mission, but when I got into orbit and tried to deploy the Hubble, I encountered a nasty bug: Mission Control told me that it was going to take approximately 3,000 years for my cargo bay doors to open. D'oh! I never got to the nifty Station construction missions at the end. This bug was fixed by a patch that I was never able to obtain (and haven't been able to find since) because Virgin Games went out of business. This game runs reasonably well using DosBOX and it's available from the Home of the Underdogs if you want to give it a try, but there are some better options available currently.

I've never tried it (I'm a Microsoft Flight Simulator guy, myself) but the X-Plane flightsim has a mode where you can perform a Shuttle reentry and landing, thanks to its spiffy computational fluid dynamics coding (SpaceShipOne's pilots and designers used a version of X-Plane for training and testing, it's CFD codes are that good).

The best bets are probably the extensive Shuttle Mods for Orbiter Space Flight Simulator; Eugene Harm also has a great guide to getting the Shuttle working in Orbiter here. Orbiter's large and active fan community is constantly upgrading and improving these mod packages. They're already pretty good, and I fully expect someone to use Orbiter to complete a top-to-bottom Shuttle simulation experience within a few years.

Finally, there's the Space Shuttle Simulator (screencap at left), an ambitious attempt to update the Virgin Games offering discussed above with modern graphics and interface. A beta version is available, and although the designer admits it's only 10% complete it already looks really promising. It's definitely worth the download.

Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space (Abandonware)

Well, as regular readers of this blog undoubtedly have figured out by now, I'm a big, huge fan of BARIS, which is still the most unique and creative strategy games ever done. I won't rehash what I said previously, but I will point you to Leon's "Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space" Page, which is the best BARIS resource on the Net and includes the patch for the DOS version as well as a detailed guide to getting the game working in DOSBox using Dfend as well as disk images of the superior CD-ROM version of the game. I've gotten the DOS version working well in DOSBox, but I haven't been able to get my old CD-ROM version to work yet. Nevertheless, I really, really, really encourage everyone to try this game at least once.

Microsoft Space Simulator (Abandonware; Available at the Home of the Underdogs, but good luck getting it to work)

Microsoft Space Simulator was a very special game that was produced by the same folks behind Microsoft Flight Simulator. MSSS realistically simulated a space flight experience. It was a true simulator in the sense that it basically lacked a plot or narrative structure (although there were missions you could accomplish), instead letting the user completely define the experience. That's OK, because the scope of this game was infinite. You could do literally anything that you could imagine: launch a Space Shuttle to Space Station Freedom, land the lunar module Challenger at the Apollo 17 landing site in the Taurus-Littrow valley, land at a Martian base, take a space freighter to Pluto, take an interstellar ship to a nearby star system, or take a Bussard ramscoop to the edge of the galaxy.

There were also prepackaged missions that you could use to get started, such as doing an Apollo CSM-Lunar Module rendezvous in Lunar Orbit. You had a wide variety of realistic space vehicles at your disposal, which were all things that could be built using real-world engineering principles. Although everything was simulated using Newtonian physics, you didn't have to worry about celestial mechanics if you didn't want to, because there was a fully functional autopilot that could take you wherever you wanted to go. That feature alone, in my opinion, is a significant advantage that this 1994 title has over its spiritual successor, the Orbiter Space Flight Simulator.

The folks who bought this game loved it, but the sales still fell short of Microsoft's expectations. It was so far afield of a conventional flightsim (airplanes and spacecraft are actually quite different from one another) that the flightsim crowd never warmed to it, and folks who like their adventures spoon-fed to them Star Wars-style couldn't handle the fact that there wasn't a Privateer-style plot. That was apparently enough to convince Microsoft to abandon an updated Windows 95 version of the game that I heard was nearly completed by the time of cancellation, which is truly unfortunate. This game deserved better.

You've probably noticed that I haven't posted any of the spectacular vistas that you could see in this game (fortunately, there are lots of screen caps over at Microsoft Space Simulator Central; head over there for a look). That's because the DOS version, which is available from the Home of the Underdogs, is notoriously finicky with Windows. In fact, this is the last DOS program ever released by Microsoft, and it seems downright determined to not work with modern Windows systems. I could get it running well with Windows 98, but since that point I haven't had any luck getting it to work. I got it working with Windows 2000 once, but I forgot to write those steps down (D'oh!) and have never gotten it to work again (despite an awful lot of trying) in XP. I couldn't even get it working with DOSBox (which says a lot about how finicky it is). There are some posts in the DOSBox forums describing how some of those folks were able to get it working with DOSBox (although none of those suggestions worked in my case). There are also some detailed setup suggestions at the “Microsoft Space Simulator: A View from a Fan” page and some other neat stuff (including screen caps) at Microsoft Space Simulator Central. Definitely worth a download and a few minutes of configuration twiddling—the results are worth it if you can get it working.

Eagle Lander 3D (Shareware, available from http://eaglelander3d.com; Full version requires license)

Well, July 20, 2006 isn't that far away. What better way to celebrate Apollo Day than by actually recreating humanity's first steps into the cosmic ocean yourself? You can do that, and more, with Ron Monsen's outstanding shareware flightsim Eagle Lander 3D. It displays a simply astonishing level of quality. The 3d-accelerated graphics are spectacular, including a fully-modeled virtual cockpit of the LM. The full version lets you do all kinds of cool things, including the landings at the Apollo 11 (Sea of Tranquility), 12 (Ocean of Storms), 15 (Hadley-Apennine), 17 (Taurus-Littrow) sites, as well as an LM racing course and a complete descent from lunar orbit.

The evaluation version can be downloaded for free and includes a complete top-to-bottom simulation of the last sixty seconds of the powered descent of the Apollo 11 mission. The final sixty seconds of the Apollo 11 descent were quite hairy, because the on-board flight computer was steering Eagle toward a field of large rocks scattered within and around a large crater. Neil Armstrong assumed manual control of the Eagle, and with Buzz Aldrin's assistance (Aldrin was calling out data from the on-board displays and the radar), guided it to a landing with approximately 15 seconds of fuel left (actually, they landed on "Empty," and only a postflight analysis was able to determine how much fuel they had left).

I've studied both the hardware and the surface operations of the Apollo missions extensively. However, although I understood on an intellectual level just how how much skill was required to land on the Moon, it wasn't until I tried this game that I fully understood just how difficult it was to guide a Lunar Module to a safe landing on Earth's “8^th Continent” the first time around. As near as I can tell, the handling qualities of the Eagle are very accurately simulated, but once you get used to it, it's relatively straightforward to maneuver provided that you use a light touch on the stick.

This game is full of nice touches. The aforementioned 3-d virtual cockpit is very well done and accurately but unobtrusively reproduces the interior of a Lunar Module. The coolest thing, though, is what happens when you safely land the Eagle on the lunar surface: The game switches to a first person mode! You make your own journey down the ladder attached to the descent stage and explore Tranquility Base using FPS-style controls. It even simulates the "kanagaroo hops" that you experience in one-sixth gravity, so it's the closest most of us will get to the lunar surface until the first lunar hotels open up. Incredible. I really like Eagle Lander 3d, and I heartily recommend it. It's a lot of fun, and it also gives you an even bigger appreciation for the magnitude of the amazing accomplishment achieved on July 20^th, 1969.

Orbiter Space Flight Simulator (Freeware; http://www.orbitersim.com)

The Orbiter Space Flight Simulator, is a closed-source freeware space simulation platform, and the spiritual successor to Microsoft Space Simulator. This program has amazing graphics, is relatively easy to learn, and has a large and active user community that is constantly producing mods and extensions that increase the functionality of this program. Plus, you really can't argue with the price ($0). I still haven't spent much time with the new version, Orbiter 2006, but by all accounts it's a significant improvement over previous versions, including higher-resolution planetary textures.

Orbiter is a significant achievement in flight simulation that I like a great deal, but like most freeware development efforts it still suffers from some minor problems [Disclaimer: these comments apply to the Orbiter 2005 version, not the new version released last month]. First and foremost, although Orbiter's greatest strength is its extensibility and customization features, the installation of mods can be a real chore that sometime requires extensive editing of text files. Minor text-editing errors can make the game crash, but tracking them down can be frustrating. I really hope that future versions of this game have a FS2004 mod-management interface. Secondly, there isn't really a Microsoft Space Simulator-style autopilot. An inspection of the Orbiter forums revealed that there are some sound physics-based reasons for not having an autopilot, but that makes it hard for beginners or users without a lot of time on their hands to get started with the game. Hopefully a fully featured autopilot will pop up in the future versions (perhaps just limited to a single vessel class). However, there are a lot of mods out there to automate things like space shuttle launches or a lunar module landings), which helps to mitigate this particular issue. At least one Orbiter autopilot project has also been started, and there are autopilot capabilities in the excellent Deltaglider III mod. Still, these minor quibbles aside, this is a great game and well worth the free download. I'm really looking forward to spending some quality time with the new version.

With the success of the Mars rovers, the resumption of Shuttle flights, the new Vision for Space Exploration, and most importantly, the onset of space tourism and commercial space development, space is ever-so-slowly starting to get appealing again. I therefore hope and expect that we'll see some more “solar sci-fi” PC games coming out in the next few years. Right now, the best space games available are Orbiter and Eagle Lander 3D. I doubt that we'll see a commercial equivalent for Orbiter, but I wouldn't be surprised if suborbital spaceflights appear in future versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator. There are some other games that I'd actually like to see more, though, including a modern remake of BARIS, perhaps with the planning of a Mars settlement effort instead of the space race-era lunar missions. I'd also really, really like to see a full-blown Civilization in Space game, where your job as the leader of a nation on Earth is to economically develop cislunar space as well as to establish independent colonies on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids--like Alien Legacy, but in our own solar system.

Past ATI AIW Drivers and MMC Versions

2006-06-21T18:58:00.000-07:00

GAA! WinBlows!

I am currently reformatting my hard drive again for the second time in the last month. This time thanks to a crappy uninstall of a program from the Windows Add or Remove Programs tool, which apparently caused an error in the hard drive partition. Well, I was only 3 programs away from having recovered from the last reformat.

Anyway, the point of this post besides a soul-healing rant-a-thon, is to update some information about the link I provided in my last ATI post: upgrading ATI Catalyst and MMC. I noticed during my redownload of the ATI upgrades for my newly re-re-formated hardrive that the link in my previous post to the list of Past Versions of Catalyst and MMC was somewhat misleading. It's not exactly wrong, but it also won't take you directly to the hidden list. I apparently underestimated the strength of ATI's conviction to keep this list out of the mainstream. Unbeknowst to me, the url at the top of the page when the list is displayed in the browser, will not, upon later use, actually take you to the list.

So here are the instructions on how to find this "hidden" list in case you are having as much trouble as I did the first time of navigating the ATI website.

1) Follow this link to ATI.
2) Make sure you allow scripts if you're using a script-blocker in your browser.
3) In the sidebar on the left, scroll down to find your operating system, click on the plus sign next to it (if its a minus you don't need to click). In my case I'm clicking on Win XP.
4) Next, click on the plus sign next to your hardware, in my case All-In-Wonder.
5) Then click on the plus next to Radeon. After doing this you will see an amazing thing: The link to past drivers and MMC versions!
6) Click on the link and be happy! ...At least until you actually try to install or use the software.

See my previous ATI posts for advice and insight about upgrading and using ATI Catalyst, MMC, and Remote Wonder: upgrading ATI Catalyst and MMC, ATI Remote Wonder -- It's a Wonder When it Works!, ATI All-in-Wonder Out of Box Review (includes review of Catalyst drivers), ATI Multimedia Center Out of Box Review, and ATI: TV Leftovers (includes note on some weird icons and how to disable TV-On-Demand).

Tags: ATI All-In-Wonder, Remote Wonder, ATI Catalyst, Catalyst Driver, ATI Multimedia Center

See A Saturn 5 Rocket from Space!

2006-06-14T14:40:00.001-07:00

With Google Earth (newest version) you can see an aging Saturn 5 in Houston, Texas, all the way from space.

Other cool views:
-Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico

-One of many launch complexes in Baikonur (the Russian spaceport)

With this much coolness, we're sure to find more Google Earth pictures we can't help but share.
:)

6 (Free) Programs I Can't Live Without

2006-06-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

1) Firefox with the RSS ticker extension.
2) Thunderbird (or Netscape Mail). Thunderbird and NS Mail are pretty similar to each other, but Thunderbird is an updated version that can be customized with extensions and RSS reading capabilities.
3) Skype for monitoring webcams. Can easily monitor a webcam, and unlike AIM Trition, you don't have to have a webcam to see someone else's. Skype or Google Talk would be good for instant messaging if more people used it. So for now, I still can't live without AIM either.
4) Microsoft OneNote 2007 (Beta 2). It's free, it's awesome! Actually, I'd have a hard time living without any of the products in the Microsoft Office Suite. But OneNote is definitely the coolest. In fact try all the Beta 2 Office 2007 products now for free at the Microsoft website!
5) Hamachi. Already praised here on Space Race Victory for its ability to overcome networking problems.
AND #6) Unlocker. A free utility that lets you delete files even when Windows says: "Cannot delete Folder: It is being used by another person or program."

Got your own set of Freebies you can't live without?

The best defense is a good offense

2006-06-09T22:48:00.000-07:00

In a story that a lot of other bloggers have noticed, there was a large bolide impact in Norway a few days ago. The force of the explosion equalled Hiroshima, but it happened in a wilderness, and fortunately nobody got hurt.

Once again, just like in Tunguska in 1908 and the infamous near-miss that occurred over the Pacific Ocean at the height of Pakistani-Indian tensions a few years back, we dodged a bullet. If the bolide had hit a large city it would have been a disaster; if it had struck in an ocean the tsunami would kill millions outright.

We live in a cosmic shooting gallery. Even a "small" bolide could kill tens of millions of people. There wouldn't be any time for Gallup polls or talking heads or interviews with "experts" on CNN or Congressional hearings to point fingers at what went wrong or editorials saying "Oops, we really shouldn't have been criticizing the American human spaceflight program for all these years, after all". Civilization would simply end.

Thanks to popcorn fluff like Amageddon and Deep Impact, you probably think that we'd just launch a space shuttle to stop a rogue bolide with our name on it. Unfortunately, with current sensors we'd be darn lucky to get a few hours warning, and by then it would be too late. Although there are some telescopes that are being built that will be on full-time asteroid watching duties, they won't be ready for a few more years. Those goofy movies depicted a far more organized response than anything we could muster currently. There's no secret Air Force manned space launchers. There's no Stargate Command ready to launch space fighters to stop bolides. We don't have sensors constantly scanning the sky looking for bolides. We don't even have spacecraft that can leave low-earth orbit. Heck, we know so little about asteroids that there's some experts who think that a nuclear deflection wouldn't even work. We need robotic and human exploration missions to asteroids to more accurately assess the threat and how to define countermeasures.

Right now, even if we had a few years of lead time, I doubt there's much we can do. We're lucky when the Shuttle flies more than twice a year, and it can't leave low-earth orbit. For the forseeable future, we are simply incapable of defending ourselves. With the Shuttle grounded, we're actually technically no better off than the dinosaurs, and we all know how well that turned out for them.

There's definitely an "Out of sight, out of mind" mentality when it comes to bolide impacts. However, you have to multiply the probability of an asteroid impact (small but actually higher than your chances of perishing in a car accident) by the result of an impact (we all have a really bad day). Seen in that light, NASA's paltry tiny chunk of the Federal Budget (and the even more minuscule sub-percentage of that amount which actually goes towards human space development and asteroid studies), while not as big as it probably should be, is a sound insurance policy.

We're not helpless, but we need time and support to correct what everyone in the know acknowledges is a really scary situation. The only defense against the inevitable is to become a true spacefaring civilization. We need infrastructure, and lots of it, and soon. We're racing against time here, and there's a good chance we could still lose. We need extensive economic development of cislunar space, robust transportation systems, and thriving, permanent communities throughout near-earth space. Only then will we have the means to intercept and deflect a bolide.

This, the creation of the means to stop an incoming asteroid, is in my view the best single reason to aggressively promote and support space settlement and development. It's a case that some people, like Apollo 16 commander John Young and current NASA Administrator Mike Griffin have been making eloquently for many years. However, we have a long way to go. In a recent example of editorial stupidity, the Washington Post proclaimed that the need to preserve human civilization in the face of this kind of threat doesn't justify the short-term expense [which, again I will point out, is far less than 1% of the Federal Budget. We actually spend about 85 times as much money on pizza and beer in the United States] of creating some of the needed infrastructure by returning humans to the Moon. I certainly hope that near-misses like the one that just happened in Norway will help to change minds of the shortsighted and convince people that we need to become a true spacefaring civilization before it's too late.

Upgrading ATI Catalyst and Multimedia Center

2006-05-31T13:27:00.000-07:00

HATE, HATE, HATE. KILL, KILL, KILL.

That was my mantra during my attempt to upgrade my ATI All-in-Wonder Catalyst drivers to the newest version 6.5 and the ATI Multimedia Center to version 9.14.

First off, the ATI website is very unhelpful. They have a searchable database to find solutions to problems, but frequently their answers don't actually tell you how to fix the problem. I was pretty naive going into this whole thing assuming that a driver update would be straightforward and easy. But it wasn't, so I feel a moral obligation to share some wisdom here.

The Catalyst Driver and Multimedia Center Update:
ATI ungracefully uninstalled. The ATI products do not like to be uninstalled (or installed for that matter). ATI recommends uninstalling older versions of Catalyst and Multimedia Center before updating. I tried this, and I don't recommend it. I my case, it resulted in a sloppy uninstall which left pieces of ATI software hanging about in Program Files, All Users, and presumably elsewhere. Manual deletion of these folders was necessary to clean the slate.

Now I'm going to impart a piece of wisdom that was not obvious to me and caused several install/uninstall events: There are separate updates for the new Catalyst driver, the Multimedia Center, Remote Wonder, and other components. The Catalyst driver does not contain all the components that you probably installed from the CD eventhough the webpage suggests it does in the Release Notes. So, don't uninstall all of these other programs unless you are going to upgrade them all separately. The Catalyst download only contains 3 things: the ATI display driver, the WDM integrated drivers, and the Catalyst control center. When the Release Notes state:

The Catalyst® software suite 6.5 contains the following:
Radeon® display driver 8.252
Multimedia Center™ 9.14
HydraVision™
HydraVision™ Basic Edition
Remote Wonder 3.03
WDM Driver Install Bundle
Southbridge/IXP Driver
Catalyst® Control Center Version 6.5

this is apparently ATI-speak for these are the programs that this download is compatible with.

Another giagantic man-eating-clam-sized pearl of wisdom: I naively thought that the 6.5 driver would work with an older version of MMC (9.06), but NO. You apparently have to have the driver and MMC that go together. They aren't mix-and-match. Putting a 6.5 driver with older versions of MMC will just cause you to go nuts when nothing works.

Installation:
In my case, the initial uninstall of the old drivers and software left my computer so confused that I had to resort to using a restore point. To make things worse, the restore point failed and Windows would no longer start up in normal mode or safe mode at which point I did a gentle reformat to preserve my data, but it erased the registry so that all programs would have to be reinistalled. After backing up the data to an extra hardisk, I did a complete reformat.

Ok, so now the disk should be clean and installing Catalyst drivers should go well, there should be no confusion, right?

That's what I thought, unfortunately, 5 installations, 5 uninstallations, 3 upgrades, and 5 restore points later, Catalyst and Multimedia Center still do not work right. MMC 9.14 was almost unusable on my computer. The TV would not display the image and the sound was echoing, and I kept getting "overlay" errors. A few more reinstalls later to make sure that everything was correctly installed still did not result in improvements in MMC performance. The Catalyst 6.5 driver seemed to work okay however.

I unistalled again and rolled back to my original drivers and software. After a lot of internet research, I finally figured out that I would have to try each driver and its associated MMC version separately to find out which would work with my particular configuration. Fortunately, I finally found the semi-hidden ATI webpage of past Catalyst drivers and MMC versions (link for XP). Best I can figure, my original drivers are approximately equivalent to Catalyst version 5.3 which is coupled with MMC 9.06 and came out around the time that my drivers were created. I avoided MMC 9.14 this time since it performed so poorly before, and went for the Catalyst 6.4 driver which couples with MMC 9.13. Huzzah! So far this software pairing actually seems to work on my computer!

The final success was achived by writing Catalyst drivers 6.5 over my original drivers and then writing over that with the 6.4 download. Next, I uninstalled the old MMC and downloaded 9.13. Then I installed 9.13. Next I uninstalled Remote Wonder version 3.2 and downloaded the version 3.4 update and installed that. Now, at least I get a picture on the TV player.

Was it worth having to reformat?
After a few minutes of playing around with the new driver and MMC, I've noticed good, bad, and stuff inbetween.

The good: the Catalyst control center opens much faster than the old one. My start up times are much faster (probably in part due to the reformat). And the new version of Remote Wonder seems to crash less often.

The vaguely neutral: Catalyst driver performance. ATI releases a new driver every month, and the release notes for each driver contains an impressive list of supposed performance improvements since the previous driver. Frequently, ATI claims improvements of 20-30% for various games. Tweaktown has done a series of tests on the Catalyst drivers to compare ATI's claims of performance improvements with actual observed improvements during game tests. While they don't test the All-in-Wonder card or any hardware similar to mine, it is interesting that they've only seen ~3% performance improvement since Catalyst 5.3 and 5.12 on 3D Mark 03. I guess I'll have to wait and see if there's any improvement the next time I load up a game (that'll be once I get my poor reformated hardisk back to its normal configuration).

The bad: there are some design flaws. The TV-On-Demand can no longer be easily disabled. It can be disabled by going into the registry (or so ATI says, I haven't tried I because I value my sanity). This is a link to ATI's instructions for disabling TV-on-Demand. I haven't noticed much decrease in TV quality due to the TV-on-Demand constantly running (at least in MMC 9.13, but it may have contributed to the TV player's poor performance in MMC 9.14). The most annoying thing to me so far is this "Overlay" crap. Apparently, there can only be one video overlay. The problem with that: you can't have a TV clone at the same time as using the TV player. This is really annoying because you either cannot output to a TV anymore, or you manually have to go into the Catalyst control center and keep changing the status of the TV as a display. One more little annoyance: when the TV is in clone mode the video image in the File Player (or DVD) is not displayed on the TV screen. I did have some success when I changed the TV to full screen mode, but not when the window was smaller. This version of Catalsyt and MMC have severely crippled the utility of the TV output in my opinion. But, I'm going to stick with it because I'm not sure I want to go through all this install/uninstall crap again just to try out other versions of MMC without knowing what I'm going to get. One of the main problems with the drivers and software seems to be its unpredictability. One version will work fine for one person but completely stink for someone else. I have to agree with ATI when they say:

Installing a new driver is only recommended if you are having issues with your ATI product.

If you've got something that works, stick with it and consider yourself lucky!

Previous Posts: ATI Remote Wonder -- It's a Wonder When it Works!, ATI All-in-Wonder Out of Box Review (includes review of Catalyst drivers), ATI Multimedia Center Out of Box Review, and ATI: TV Leftovers (includes note on some weird icons and how to disable TV-On-Demand).

Tags: ATI All-In-Wonder, Remote Wonder, ATI Catalyst, Catalyst Driver, ATI Multimedia Center

An Epic Review of Civilization IV (Part 3)

2006-05-30T23:45:00.002-07:00

This review is so long (ironically, just like a game of Civ IV) that it has been broken up into three posts. This is Part 3. You can visit Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

In this part of my Civilization IV review, we’ll discuss in detail some of what I feel are the game’s principal shortcomings, beginning with the major lack of new content.

The trend in previous Civilization games has been increasing complexity, while preserving fun and entertaining gameplay. Civilization II had many more features and content than Civilization I, and Alpha Centauri had many more features and content than Civilization II. However, the increasing complexity was always done in such a way that it was fun, and I really appreciated how each new release added more and more stuff. It provided a lot of strategic options for the player, thus making it interesting and replayable. That’s the reason why I kept coming back to Civilization, replaying it frequently, and upgrading with gusto as each new release and expansion pack came out.

That trend was well and truly ended with Civilization III. There wasn’t really any major new content, and since they tried to simplify the game, a lot of game elements were removed (as evidenced by the simplistic space race victory mode). As a consequence, I felt that Civilization III was far less engaging and replayable than its predecessors, and displayed a notable lack of creativity, especially when compared to SMAC. So, I was hoping that Civilization IV would have significant new content. However, I was supremely disappointed with what was actually included in Civilization IV. Besides the graphical eye-candy, the only truly new gameplay component is religion. I therefore think that Civilization IV seriously missed the boat when it came to new content in general (I covered some specific gameplay-related issues in Part 2), but this is especially true when it comes to a certain class of content that I'll call “The Longer Reach of History.”

The Vision Thing: One of the most fun things about Alpha Centauri was that it was a well-thought out, carefully researched extrapolation of future technologies and social trends. One of the things that supremely disappointed me about previous Civilization games is that they all stop at 2050. You don't get to see the starship land, you don't get to build maglevs, or fusion reactors, or photon computers, or hypersonic aircraft, or fuel cells, or lunar colonies, or undersea habitats, or reusable space launch vehicles. I want to see what the future is like, and how decisions I made in the 3rd century B.C. affect that future. Will my nation look like Blade Runner, or like Star Trek’s San Francisco, circa 2364? How will orbital bombers affect political and military relationships on this planet? Will new technologies like methane hydrate extraction and asteroid mining reduce or enhance global conflicts?

Now, this is a contentious issue on the Civ forums. There's a vocal contingent of people (for the sake of anonymity, we’ll just call them the “ignorant luddites”) who feel that the game is a historical recreation of human history, and future techs absopositively do not belong in Civilization, ever. Their arguments can be distilled to two points: 1)That they don’t think that “Future Techs” like lunar colonies will ever happen, and therefore shouldn’t be in Civilization or b) extending the game out to the far future would impose having to learn a complicated and tedious tech tree on the player, thus making it less fun. Point A is demonstrably untrue; we’ll get to that later. Point B does have some small degree of validity. The SMAC tech tree is probably the biggest single reason why veteran Civilization players didn’t like SMAC. I say “small” because all you had to do to understand the tech tree was read the Datalinks about the tech in question and/or look at the handy tech tree poster that shipped with the game, and you’d be all set. Just another example of how people irrationally fear change.

My considered response to the Point A is a firm “tbbbpffft.” I encounter luddites frequently, and to be blunt I pity folks who don't want to see what's over the next hill. The future is going to happen, and it’s also going to be where you’ll be spending the rest of your life. If a SMAC-style extrapolation to the year 3000 is too daunting, then you could make the cutoff, say, 2200 and still have an entertaining and plausible extrapolation to some limited set of future technologies and social trends. I'm told that the Activision Civilization series tried to do this, but since I never played those games I'm not sure how successful they were (scuttlebutt is, not very). In a nutshell, what I really, really wanted to see in Civilization IV was some sort of melding of the Civilization Tech Tree with the SMAC tech tree, as well as the inclusion of an undersea colonies and space development system that improved on the SMAC feature set. Now, that would have been cool.

Unfortunately, Civilization IV is even more minimalistic and nihilistic than Civilization III. In many respects, it has a lesser scope than the original game! You can build the space elevator, which really doesn't do that much, and research an aptly though uninspiring named “Future Tech”. Real imaginative, guys. The game still ends at 2050. There's no provision for stuff like fusion power. If you were expecting ocean settlements, like in Alpha Centauri, you'll be disappointed. There’s also no provision for OTEC power plants, manganese mining, and methane hydrate extraction. Ditto for maglevs, fusion plants, or any of the other technologies that we will be able to see for ourselves over the next few decades.

Space is our civilization’s future...too bad it's not in Civilization: Which brings us to the High Frontier (you knew this would pop up sooner or later, didn't you?). I've always been profoundly bugged about the fact that you can send a ship to Alpha Centauri but you can't colonize the Moon or Mars in Civilization. Here in real life, the Moon and Mars have been there for the taking since 1972 and we haven't done squat. Alpha Centauri voyages are at least 50 years away, and will almost certainly require an extensive infrastructure in cislunar space to make it happen (or, to put it another way: Thriving communities on the Moon, Mars, the Trojans, and the asteroids will begat thriving communities in other star systems).

Space development is the classic disruptive technology. When the United States succeeds in making space an accessible realm of human economic endeavor, we'll reap some pretty significant rewards that will transform our society: unlimited power from space solar power stations, unlimited materials mined from asteroids, super strong alloys created in microgravity factories, a virtually unlimited supply of platinum-group metals for fuel cells....I'll stop there, but there's a million more. Space is important. Whether Western civilization will survive depends entirely on whether or not, over the next few decades, we succeed in opening the High Frontier. Due to simple incompetence and lack of will, it’s quite possible that we won’t, and then our lives will all get a lot worse rather quickly.

Since the long term survival of our civilization depends on our development of space, it is therefore completely appropriate for space development and settlement to be part of a Civilization game. Now, I’m not alone in wanting to see this, because this is one of the most-requested features for the Civ games. In fact, I remember seeing an editorial in the short-lived Egghead Software Magazine suggesting that space development should be a part of Civilization back in 1992. It's even in the List of Lists mentioned in Part One. I'm therefore surprised that it hasn't been put in yet, except for a limited implementation in SMAC, which actually had orbital power systems, hydroponic facilities, and asteroid mining built in. It was primitive, but it was there. I gather that the first Call to Power game had a space colonization component, but apparently it wasn't very good, because it's frequently cited as the best reason to not include it in Civilization!

To that, I say, “Poppycock!” There's lots of ways that one could unobtrusively add space development to Civilization, you just need to be creative. For example, you could have a space solar power system be a Wonder that provides free energy to your civilization. You could do what SMAC did, and have space mining colonies be components built and launched from individual cities. You could have the first Civ to get to an asteroid receive unlimited resources.

You even could simulate the whole thing (although I’ll admit that this would probably work better as part of its own standalone game), unlocking it when you hit that point on the tech tree. You could build O’Neill habitats at the Lagrange points, lunar colonies, and start to terraform Mars, while simulating the population growth and the trade routes (lunar solar power to Earth for funds, lunar oxygen to the space stations, super strong materials to Earth and the Moon, etc.) The colonies would have a more limited set of city improvements and could increase your civilization size total. The space colonies would "unlock" the research of more technologies (microgravity-produced materials and pharmaceutical products) and Wonders like space solar power systems that would give your terrestrial civilization definite advantages. The fancy 3-d globe view in Civilization IV could have been used to zoom out to see a view of the solar system and would allow you to click on various planets or points in space, which would bring up a more traditional Civilization world interface for each point, a lot like Sierra's classic "Alien Legacy" (like in the screenshot at left). Heck, you could even have an option for a “traditional” Civilization game, letting the luddites turn off all of this future tech and space stuff to keep them happy. There seems to me to be a lot of gaming potential here, and I while think it’s clear that a standalone Civilization in Space product would be an incredibly fun and rewarding experience to play with an amazing array of strategic choices, there certainly exists opportunities to add Future Tech and space development to a more traditional, terrestrially-centered Civilization game.

Unfortunately, none of this applies to Civilization IV. You can build a space elevator, but there's still no provision for Lunar or Martian colonies, asteroid mining, O'Neill colonies, space factories, or X-40 style orbital bombers in Civilization IV. Granted, if you have a space elevator, then all the rest of this stuff will happen in due course, which was probably in the back of the designer’s minds. Still, that's not as much fun as doing it yourself.

Although I understand that the designers wanted to keep things simple, I think that they really missed the boat on this one. There must be a fun way to add this “Longer Reach of History” content, including an expanded tech tree, a significant space settlement and development component, future weapons, and projected social trends to a terrestrially-centered Civilization game, without it being dull and tedious. Firaxis had a chance to create an epic and inspiring game about humanity's inevitable spread into the Universe that surrounds us, and they blew it. They're now going to get beaten to the punch by Spore, which already looks like it's going to be a very special game. I expect and hope that enterprising modders will start adding more future technology components, including space colonization, to the game now that the SDK is out.

A Mod World: The answer to the missing content and gameplay issues raised above is going to be the game's modability and extensibility. I’m a big fan of game mods; Mods for UT2004 have really expanded the longevity of that title, and in the case of Orbiter, for example, have dramatically added to its the content and usefulness. So, I am very happy that Civilization IV was built from the ground up to support modding and includes native support for XML and Python. Almost all aspects of the game can be changed. Now that the SDK has been formally released, I expect the quantity and quality of mods to dramatically increase. I also expect that many of my problems with the gameplay and content will eventually be rectified by mods. The best place to get mods, of course, is the Civilization Fanatics Forum Creation and Customization section, where there’s lots and lots of good stuff.

Modding is great, so why is it in this section? The reason is managing the mods is a real chore. The model for supporting fan-made mods is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004. FS2004 has a really neat interface that let’s you add mods to the game, pick the ones you want to play with (you can pick as many as you want, and they’re persistent across gaming sessions), and tells you of potential conflicts if you’re running more than one, all from within the game. By contrast, much of the Civ IV modding is done by adding files in Windows Explorer and/or modifying text files, you can only run one mod at a time from within the game, and when you start a mod it requires a game restart. That’s annoying. If Civ IV was the first game that supported mods, I would go easy on it, but here in the 21^st century, an FS2004-style mod management screen isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Bugs...lots of 'em: This brings me to the technical issues, which are the biggest single problem with this game. When the game first came out, I experienced repeated crashes and memory leaks. It was unplayable. The first patch helped things a little bit, but serious problems persisted for me until the 1.52 patch released Christmas Eve. Now, in a post-1.52 patch world, when game year 1900 comes along, I still start to experience severe memory leaks, video stutters, and hang-ups. Needless to say, it's massively annoying and frustrating, especially since with my build-gobs-of-infrastructure-then-smush-my-opponents-with-modern-armor style of play most of the action happens near the end of the game. I suspect that I would enjoy this game more if it didn't make me wait for 10-15 seconds before every unit movement or battle resolution. The typical answer to this problem on the forums seems to be “Buy more RAM,” which I suppose might be considered by some a valid solution. BUT, in my opinion, if you meet the minimum hardware requirements for a game, it should run just fine at a low or even medium graphical detail setting. You may have to turn off some eye-candy, but with all the settings dialed down it should run very smoothly in all situations. In my case, my machine easily exceeds the hardware settings listed on the Civilization IV box, and it still runs slower than molasses in February, even with all of the graphics settings dialed down to their minimum. I regard this as completely unacceptable. 2K/Firaxis actually had an extensive public beta for the game, which should have ironed out most if not all of the technical problem. Astonishingly, the beta test did not. I wish that Firaxis had been a little less aggressive with their hardware requirements, and had also tested the game on more laptops and low-end systems in order to iron out the kinks for those of us without liquid-cooled dual-core Falcon V Athlon FX-62 SLI RAID systems. Since the 1.09 patch pushed the onset of severe memory leaks back to the 1800s and the 1.52 patch pushed the leaks back to the 1900s I'm hoping that the 1.61 patch will push them into the 2000s. [UPDATE: Nope, memory leaks still there with the 1.61 patch...guess I'll see how the next patch does….]

Conclusion: If it sounds like I have conflicting opinions about Civilization IV, I do. I give the designers a lot of kudos for reevaluating the user experience from the ground up. I really can't blame them for not trying new things. There really is a lot to like in this game, including: The simplified new game interface, the ability to zoom out and see the whole planet, the new civics screen, the refined emphasis on culture and scientific research, the replacement of the pollution with the much more fun “health” metric, the return of wonder movies, religions, improved enemy AI, and extensive built-in mod support.

I really do like some of the design changes, but for every cool thing they put in, either they changed something that I liked or put in something I didn't like, including: The “and/or” tech tree, the snarky civilopedia, the useless advisor screens, the “Diplomatic Spreadsheet” that takes most the fun out of negotiations with AI players, the unrealistic nuclear weapons, the non-unique artwork for civilization units, guys with pointy sticks can still defeat B-2s, there's no throne room or palace, the on-orbit assembly version of the space race victory is still MIA, excessive hardware requirements, and it still has significant technical problems, even after three patches.

By most reasonable metrics, Civilization IV is a good and (mostly) fun game. Despite the preceding rants, I actually like it quite a bit. But I also strongly feel that it’s missing something. Civilization IV doesn't include features that I and other fans have been waiting for a long time to see, including better military management, dual production queues, a longer reach of history, an expanded tech tree, futuristic military units, undersea colonies, and space development. This complete lack of major new content is a severe shortcoming of the game. I think that Firaxis/2K really missed the conceptual boat by not turning outward and melding Civilization with Alpha Centauri, especially with Spore on the way. Instead, they turned inward, simplifying and narrowing the focus of the game, and in the process I feel that they stripped a lot of the game's personality and character away. In addition, I strongly feel that the move to a 3-d graphics engine, while having impressive results on high-end systems, unnecessarily imposed excessive hardware requirements on the 99.9% of us who don't have dual-core gaming powerhouse machines while causing a bevy of technical problems with the game--without actually improving the gameplay.

Is Civilization IV better than Civilization III? It's different, but not necessarily better. Is it better than Civilization II? Nope. Is it better than Alpha Centauri? Definitely not. Is it fun? Yes. Do I like Civilization IV? Yes, and I play it frequently, but I strongly feel that it's a few patches and several mods away from being the game that it could be. Is Civilization IV worth buying? Maybe. More than any other game I think I've ever played, my answer to the question “Should I buy Civilization IV?” would be “It depends”. If you are someone who has always been put off by the complexity of the Civilization series, now is your big chance to try it. If you loved Civ I, Civ II, and SMAC, Civ IV is different enough that you might be put off. In any case, you should download the demo and see if it works well with your hardware, as well as meshes with your individual tastes and expectations. You'll probably like it, but there's also a decent chance that you won't.

Be sure to also read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, as well our story about a three day multiplayer Civilization IV match, Juliraptor's discussion about how to mod and patch Civilization IV, and her impressions of the game. Photo Credit: Civilization IV Fansite Kit/Firaxis.

Tags: Civilization IV