Mar 25 2013
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gaming

Thoughts: SimCity.

city

SimCity! The game which, if you believe the gaming press, is irrevocably ruined by that Great Satan of modern PC gaming: always-online DRM masquerading as social functions . Many, many column inches have been written about SimCity’s disastrous launch, when (as with all online game launches these days) the servers fell over under the strain and nobody could play it for a week without sitting in an hours-long queue. The game was pilloried by its playerbase, as users flocked to Metacritic to dump SimCity’s score into the red and give it an average rating of just one star on Amazon1 It’s one of the most botched releases in recent memory, with some people blaming the resignation of EA’s CEO squarely on SimCity’s failure.

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  1. Amazon even stopped listing the game for a few hours based on the number of refund requests they were getting and there’s still some bad business going on between them and EA. ↩
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Mar 24 2013
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gaming

Sunday Soundtracks.

Have I mentioned how awesome the Freespace 2 intro is yet? The pan up through the atmosphere and through the hole punched in the destroyer’s side — and then the subsequent Colossus reveal — is a great visual trick which is helped immensely by having this little bit of music play over the top of it.

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Mar 18 2013
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gaming

Thoughts: Heart of the Swarm.

Personal update: The good news is that I’ve finally found somewhere to live up here. The bad news is that I can’t move in until the start of April, and while I can bang together a game review in three hours on a train I can’t do science posts without sitting down and doing research — which is kind of impossible when you have no fixed abode. This basically means no posts aside from Monday reviews until after April 1st. Sorry!

zap

This is very disappointing.

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Mar 17 2013
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gaming

Sunday Soundtracks.

A little more retro this week, with another excellent Bitmap Brothers theme for the Chaos Engine.

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Mar 13 2013
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science

How To Measure The End Of The World.

whee

I was researching a fun post about the apocalypse today when I suddenly came across a disaster scale I’d never even heard of before. It’s the Volcanic Explosivity Index, which is a way of measuring the magnitude of volcanic eruptions via the amount of ejecta they produce – not a perfect way of ranking volcanic eruptions, if you ask me, but probably the only one that’s really possible given all the different ways a volcano can explode. It then struck me that it might be a good idea to spend a little while talking about the major disaster scales and why they’re set up the way they are, since it’ll be a good setup for whenever I do get around to the apocalypse, as well as ensuring that next time you read a news report about an earthquake you’ll have some idea of what the experts mean when they say it measured 5.8 on the Richter scale.

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Mar 11 2013
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gaming

Thoughts: Tomb Raider.

climb

Despite being old enough to remember rolling my eyes at the original media sensation over Lara Croft1 I have a confession to make: I’ve never actually played a Tomb Raider game. Well, except for the excellent Guardian of Light spinoff back in 2011, but that game’s fixed isometric perspective and focus on co-op means that it doesn’t really count. They didn’t make Tomb Raider games for the N64, and when the first reboot rolled around in 2006 the gameplay looked distinctly dated since there were other, fresher games doing the same sort of thing – Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed and so on. In a peculiarly ironic twist, the Tomb Raider series itself always seemed to me to be just as much of an archaeological relic as the collection of ancient ruins that Lara explores in every game – and with five games in the original series and three more after the reboot, there were a lot of games. It’s no wonder the franchise looked a bit tired.

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  1. It went roughly along the lines of “It’s A GIRL! In a game!” and led to her being mentioned in the same breath as the Spice Girls, Girl Power and all that other tedious mid-nineties guff when Britain temporarily convinced itself it was young and vibrant and etc. etc. ↩
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Mar 10 2013
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gaming

Sunday Soundtracks.

Baldur’s Gate 2 has a decent enough soundtrack, but Throne of Bhaal took things in a completely different direction by embracing a very early 80s fantasy movie sound. (Note: do not ever actually watch any of these films, because the music is by far the best thing about them.)

Personal update: I am not dead, and will try to get out a full spread of posts next week. Going to be a while before I get my accommodation issues sorted though, I think — the Oxford rental market be crazy, yo.

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