Bruce Lee. Incredible.

Playing ping pong with nunchucks. And winning!

Ocean’s 13

George Clooney

Roads to Moscow

Al Stewart’s “Roads to Moscow” without  a doubt is the greatest rock song ever written about World War II . Listened to it for the first time in years after we added the album Past, Present and Future to our ITunes collection.  From the previous post about the beginning of civilization to this, an affecting depiction of the near-end of it, here’s a fine visual treatment done by one Michael Lang.

Gobelki Tepe – It all started here

Civilization, love it or hate it, archeologists believe they’ve found the origination point. The way we’re going these days, though, pretty soon we may all be Gobelki Tepians.

Tralfamador Found!

Well, maybe this isn’t the planet where Billy Pilgrim met Valerie Perrine but the star in what is now officially a “system” has almost as funny a name: Fomalhaut.

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” – Sherlock Holmes

A quote from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, from a passage where Doyle asserts that the human mind, properly medicated, is more powerful than the supernatural. After sneering at a supposed man of science’s tale of the spectral hound, he sends Watson off for the day so he can apply his mind to the case. On Watson’s return to a room dense with tobacco smoke, obviously emitted by a man who has not left his London rooms, he asserts that he has traveled to the location of the crime, in Devonshire. “In spirit?” Watson asks.

“Exacty. My body has remained in this arm-chair, and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco.”

RIP Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton, truly a King-of-All-Media Media Renaissance Man, is gone. We didn’t even know he was sick.

Personally, we remember reading The Andromeda Strain at the shore one summer, and then the following year, in my first real job, as an usher, we got to see the movie version about 30 times. Enjoyed it every time.

Later came Jurassic Park and ER, but if you read his memoir, Travels, you’d know that he was at one time convinced that he was locked in psychic combat with, in his words, The Entity. His strange real-life psychological struggle was never made into a work of fiction. Truth is stranger than fiction, after all, especially that kind of personal truth.

Here’s his sensible synthesis of the interconnection between belief in aliens and the promotion of Global Warming. Only Crichton could have written it, lectured it , or gotten it published. Even so, for essays like this, and for making a best-seller like with State of Fear, which dissents from popular scientific myth-making, Crichton is, and will be, ridiculed as much as a mega-successful author/filmmaker could be, by far far lesser talents.

Lileks-ania

As the real world news worsens, and will surely get worse than that, time for the still sane among us to tune out and escape. Play a comouter game, or have a look at James Lileks’ site. Enjoy the matchbook cover collection. I used the same excuse when I was a pre-teen smoker, James. “Yes, Mom. That’s why you found matches in my pants pocket. I collect matchbook covers. Mm hm.”

IB News: a Key to GamersGate

As an early winter sweeps into the Northeast US like an umpire’s flamboyant strike three call, the late October nor’ easter snow storm is easier to handle since InfinityBound has received its press membership to GamersGate. GamersGate is the online computer game delivery portal run by Paradox Interactive. The four games initially set for review are:

• Europa Universalis III: Complete.This is the latest release of the EU franchise, which includes all the latest add-ons. Lance Shears has committed to doing the review. An expert on the Europa engine titles from way back, there’s none better qualified to handle it.
• Mount and Blade. We may work on Chuck to have a look at this one, providing he gets in gear with his school work. If not I’ll be looking at it.
• Penumbra: both Black Plague and Requiem. A horror adventure.
• And Dark Horizon. A spaceship shoot-em-up. 

And tonight the Phillies play the rest of the weird suspended game for the World Series title. Go Phillies!

Spore: 2 of 5….and already played out

For the researchers of this question, whether anticipation enhances enjoyment of a consumer product  the Spore phenomenon might be an interesting topic. Apparently if you’re anticipating something good you’re okay with a delay. And, oh, oddly enough, if you end up with something bad, the delay is fine too. So that works out well.

In this case, waiting almost two years for Spore doesn’t seem to evoke much in the way of disappointment. It’s not great and it’s not horrible , so that may be just in the exact middle of the anticipation scale. We’re not upset at laying out the $50 USD for it because it is obviously a work of high craft and, covering, as we’ve said, a topic of extreme interest to us, a life simulator, we were looking forward to it for two solid years around here. Sorry to say it doesn’t look like it will have the staying power of a Civilization IV, or even X-COM, which has just been revived hereabouts, on, of all things, an old Windows 95 box.

In general, though the graphics and execution are superficially excellent, there is something a little bit off about nearly every aspect of the game, gameplay-wise. It may be a matter of blockbuster-syndrome that you see in $100 million film projects. Will Wright is a pioneer and may be one of the few designers who could pull something like Spore together, but when that much money is involved, no project can possibly be the vision of one person.

This review will concentrate on the gameplay. The creation of creatures, vehicle and buildings is a whole other aspect that is an activity in itself, if that appeals to you. Much of it has nothing at all to do with the playing of the game. Design one factory or spaceship and it will do you forever. This is all tied in with the game company’s effort to create a community around the game. That’s not really why we play games.  

The five games phases are actually distinct game styles that represent five genres in computer gaming.

Cellular Phase
Game genre: Early Arcade. After the opening movie, in which the cosmos is revealed and your plant is bombarded by comet debris, you’re an ostensibly one-celled animal in a tidal pool. this is not the theorized beginning-of-life-on-Earth model we had expected, that is, the Primordial Ooze. You’re in a tide pool, which would be near the shore, and long after the initial beginnings of life on the planet. So in a sense, the title of the entire software is a bit off. So you’re in the pool and you get to choose what sort of mouth you have. This is your first choice, carnivore or vegetarian. No real weight is assigned to that choice, or wasn’t in the one game I played almost-through. There may be nuances to detect upon frequent playing, but if herbivore is supposed to connote vegetarians which is supposed to imply pacifist, it didn’t work out that way in my one game.

Creature phase
Game Genre: Adventure/Roleplaying: One point for this phase. This is the cutest, and all things considered, the most fun phase. It should appeal to the furries out there. In fact any expansion concentrating on this phase might be worth checking out. (Heck, two years from now we may have forgotten our ambivalence about the initial release enough to give it a try.)

Village Phase
Genre: Real Time Strategy. Take over your continent by either defeating or befriending your neighbors. Repetitive, and, like all Real Time Strategy titles, it’s a click-fest. So if you enjoy that sort of thing you might like it. Win the continent by either allying with or defeating every other tribe on it. Quite the forgettable phase.

Civilization
Genre: Civilization: The greatest of computer games, a genre in itself. This phase is a severely hobbled form of it. Win your planet by overwhelming the cities of others, either by force, religion or commerce. Whatever vehicles you make will project that form of force. Doesn’t really matter what you start with, the cities you take over will determine what you end up with. My one pass through I started as religious but left the phase as military. The game almost gets a point for this, but at some point the AI seemed like it stopped playing. At normal difficulty levels, the game shouldn’t let you win.

Space Phase
Genre: 4X Space Strategy. Most disappointed, most anticipated, but still worth a point because it could have been the space conquest and exploration game we’ve been questing for since Master of Orion. But the random events in the short experience seemed heavily weighted toward bio-disaster, of course. And the “culling of the herd” nature of both the bio-disasters we encountered was disturbing. Two aspects killed this phase for us, one philosophical and the other physical: 1) we’re not enamored of flying around a planet killing off diseased individuals of a species, and 2) the 3D and the jumpy navigation around the planet surface and up and down into space and back activated some kind of vertigo reaction yours truly gets whenever playing a First Person Shooter or other action 3D games. Unfortunately playing through nausea and dizzyness is not my idea of fun. This may not bother others but it’s enough to set the game aside for me, and in the most promising phase too. O well. But from what we saw, and allowing for benefit of the doubt, it gets the other point for promise.

On the controversies surrounding the science versus intelligent design aspects, that’s for a longer post, if ever. There is no real science of genetics involved. Nor is it any more godlike than all the other god-games that have come along. It’s a game, not a treatise.

And also as we’ve mention in another post, as with big budget projects on favored film subjects, so much time, effort, money and genius having been spent on a topic, another attempt at is is not likely to happen for a long while, perhaps until a big orders-of-magnitude jump in  technology, like when we’re all comparing the gigabytes of RAM we have implanted in our heads.

So it gets 2 of 5. One for the Creature phase and one for the Space phase, which looked like the most ambitious gameplay, even though we couldn’t play it much. Sigh.

The ultimate evaluation on Spore around here, though? None of the Shears spawn are playing it. Lance has gone back to Europa Universalis II. Chuck bought an eight-year-old swords and sorcery with his own money, Diablo II, which I’ve set aside Civ IV for, and Escella is sharing a game of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened with Mrs. Shears.

So much for two years of anticipation.