Today's Candy (Copernicus Crater)

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

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

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

SimCity for iPhone pop cap?

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

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?

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

So much to blog about, so little time

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.