Games

Greatest strategy game ever?

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My copy of Grand Theft Auto IV still hasn’t arrived yet but I’m not unhappy because I’m fully occupied with Fall from Heaven 2 at the moment. This may have started life as a mere “mod” for Civilization 4, but it’s so complete and fully featured that I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a full game in its own right. Builds of it has been circulating since 2006 but the development team only announced it as being feature complete in December 2008 so I’m not feeling too guilty about waiting until now to invest time into it. Hey, if I’m going to put dozens of hours into it, I want the finished and polished package!

For players already used to Civilization 4, a simple glance at the screen reveals how much work has gone into this project: new models and artwork for the different units and buildings of the 21 factions, new terrain types and effects with associated art and sound assets, a revamped UI to incorporate the additional gameplay elements and even a detailed card mini-game within the game! By far the greatest accomplishment however is that while a faction in Civilization 4 is differentiated from its peers only by its leader traits and a unique unit and building, all of the factions in Fall from Heaven 2 are so different that it’s like playing a new game with each of them.

Not only do each of the factions have numerous unique units and buildings, they also incorporate unique gameplay mechanics. The Grigori faction for example, can produce Adventurers as Great Persons, effectively powerful heroes that can be customized according to your needs. The Calabim faction stands out by being the only one able to field vampires, and, yes, these really are as powerful as one would imagine them to be and can feed on your cities’ excess population. In addition to all that, the choice of religion also opens up new units, buildings, spells and civics.

All of this makes for a combination of rich and interesting choices that I’ve never seen since Alpha Centauri. Plenty of people have already named Civilization 4 as one of the greatest strategy games of all time, but I can confidently say that Fall from Heaven 2 improves upon it in every conceivable way. Watch this blog for updates as I explore the myriad possibilities of this amazing game.

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Religion

U.S. Army attempting to spread Christianity in Afghanistan?

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For a blog that’s supposedly about atheism, I’m aware that I’ve done precious little writing on it of late. So here’s an article that, if true, makes for a great example of why government should always be separate from religion. It’s from Al Jazeera, admittedly not the most reliable of news sources especially on subject like this, and alleges that elements of the U.S. military are surreptitiously trying to proselytize to the local populace in Afghanistan.

From the article:

In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, tells soldiers that, as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him”.

“The special forces guys – they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.

“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”

The good news is that this is already against the U.S. military’s own rules. The bad news is that it’s not certain how far up this goes and how widespread this is. From my reading of the discussion thread on QT3 where this popped up, it seems that this is a relatively new thing and might well be another one of George W. Bush’s unfortunate legacies. To be sure, it is not the proselytization of Christianity that I oppose, even if it is illegal according to Afghan law, but the fact that it is being done by a government agency and that this clearly undermines the very mission the U.S. is performing in Afghanistan.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (April ’09)

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Just three articles this month, all of them related to biology in one way or another. The first one concerns what looks like an evolutionary adaptation in humans to living in the tropics. As this article from BBC News explains, scientists have long known that the birth rates of boys and girls vary across the world and that one of the factors that determine this variance is environmental stress. Biologically, males are considered more fragile than females and since having children is a huge investment, it makes sense that in a harsh environment, women tend to give birth to more girls since they would be likelier to survive.

According to research by Dr. Kristen Navara published in Biology Letters, people who live in the tropics produce more girls than boys compared to more temperate regions, even after adjusting for differences in lifestyle and socio-economic status. As Dr. Navara explains, this could simply be because male sperm works in a different way closer to the equator or that miscarriage rates might be affected somehow, but it could also be interpreted to more generally mean that living in the tropics is itself a form of environmental stress on the human organism.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (April ’09) →

Games

An interlude in Middle Earth

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Since I’m done with Empire for a while, I’ve been looking for something a bit more action-oriented. I’d already decided that it would either be Grand Theft Auto IV or Saint’s Row 2, and I’m slightly embarrassed that I ended up choosing GTA after having written this post. It seems that the PC ports of both of these games are awful, but Saint’s Row 2 is an order of magnitude worse, so GTA it is.

It’s going to take some time to get to me however because it’s backordered over at Pcgame.com.my so in the meantime, I thought I’d take advantage of the free trial of Lord of the Rings Online, one of the MMOs I’ve always been curious about. I’d always pictured LotRO as a sort of World of Warcraft 2.0 set in Middle Earth and I’ve heard good things about the Shire starting area for hobbits so I went ahead and downloaded the client and made myself a trial account.

No surprise that the game looks and feels a lot like WOW. Yes, instead of exclamation and question marks on top of the heads of quest givers, you have rings instead. Cute. What was surprising to me was that despite being able to copy so much from WOW, how unpolished it still is. Everything from the launcher, to the little icons for skills and abilities to how the UI doesn’t scale to your resolution, just reminds of how much better WOW does things. Of course, LotRO has a leg up on WOW in that its graphical engine is visibly superior, especially when looking at the landscape, but I found myself missing WOW‘s art direction.

As for world building, while I can agree that the Shire does indeed look superbly realized, I can’t help but roll my eyes at how the game breaks the lore in so many ways. Hobbits fighting men and even dwarves in the Shire? Traders in Michel Delving selling weapons to hobbits? I know that all this is pretty much necessary in an MMO, but it still induces severe nerd rage in me.

Anyway, I enjoyed my brief stay in Middle Earth and made it a point to visit some particular places of interest that I remember from the books, such as the Party Tree, but I don’t really see the long-term appeal in playing this. It actually made me WOW for a while. Still, it was free so I can’t complain too much and I got a good couple of days’ entertainment out of it.

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Science

Robot controlled flying sniper

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This is an invention that could have come straight from a sci-fi movie: a remote-controlled helicopter drone equipped with a highly accurate sniper rifle capable of seven to ten aimed shots per minute. It’s all over the various news outlets now, but because a QT3 member actually worked on it, it got posted there before the news really spread out. The Wired article even leaves out the best part. It mentions that it uses a videogame-type controller, but Charlatan on QT3 reveals that it uses an actual Xbox 360 controller to control its flight.

As other posters on QT3 have jokingly pointed out, this must be a great way to save on operator training costs. Look at how many people are playing Halo with the same controllers already!

Politics

Electoral fraud in Russia, claims the election winner

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If I were really snarky, I’d headline this post with a title like “In Soviet Russia, election frauds you!” Electoral frauds in Russia aren’t particularly shocking news, especially in Russia, but how often do you see it being claimed by the winner rather than the loser? Yet this is exactly what happened when a first time candidate for Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia, Anton Chumachenko, claimed that his victory was due to electoral fraud and that his opponent should have won instead.

Of course, the really tragic part is that the party seems to be doing everything it can to downplay the announcement and stall investigations. From the article in The Washington Post:

Chumachenko has provided evidence to the court and urged it to transfer his mandate to Vishnevsky. A ruling is pending. Meanwhile, prosecutors have sought to examine the original ballots. Election officials say they were damaged when a water pipe burst, an explanation that has been used before in Russia to stall investigations into election irregularities.

“We have very smart pipes,” Chumachenko said with a grin. “They know exactly where to leak.”

I post this because I think it jives well with my point about democracies. They’re the best form of government there is, but simply holding elections, even if they were free and fair which this one obviously was not, is not enough to qualify a country to be called a democracy. Yet repressive governments are fearful enough that they go to great lengths to show that they are democratic. Which is why we should all be ever ready to condemn them when they are not.

News & Politics

Private banking is for suckers

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I read with some amusement today’s article in The Malaysian Insider on plans by the Royal Bank of Scotland to target rich women in Singapore as clients for its private banking arm. Granted, I’ll never have enough money to even be considered as a client for a private bank, so I’m open to charges of writing out of spite and envy, but in general, my impression is that private banking is getting a lot of bad press at the moment.

Continue reading Private banking is for suckers →

The unexamined life is a life not worth living