New Terrain

SimCity (2013), Electronic Arts promotional screenshot

After ten years there's a new SimCity out (Societies doesn't count), but this is not an outright review of that game. At the start of March my internet connection died for several prolonged hours. After repeatedly trying to view several websites out of habit before realising they'd never load, I looked for something else to do. I hadn't played SimCity 3000 in nearly two years so I fired that up. What a good thing it is that always-online DRM hadn't been invented in 1999 because I would have been screwed as the new game even saves your cities in "the cloud". Since I last seriously played it, my city was populated by over a million sims and it had expanded almost to the limits without becoming one of those highly efficient cities designed by a player who has brutally calculated the placement of every building. My ideas about what a large city should look like are still firmly rooted in the skyline of Manhattan, hence I've kept the default building style in SC3K Unlimited. Only recently has London started racing for the clouds.

The Stars Our Destination

Star Trek Into Darkness poster

Hard to believe it's just gone ten years since Star Trek: Nemesis was released. 2002 was expected to be a great year for sci-fi: The Matrix sequels, a Red Dwarf film, a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film, and the aforementioned Star Trek X. In the end only Nemesis made it out that year alongside the equally poor Die Another Day. Shatner's diabolical Final Frontier narrowly avoided being responsible for the death of the Trek film franchise in 1989 - sadly the responsibility for achieving just that thirteen years later fell on The Next Generation cast. Interesting it should happen in December 2002 at the exact time Die Another Day was doing the same for Bond. As with my Skyfall review, discussing Star Trek into Darkness requires discussing my experiences with Trek. Be warned, it's going to take a few thousand words before I get to the review...

Like Soldiers Believe They're in Control of the War

Part Three of Three.

My flag proposal for Theta Battalion, January 2007

I could have published this final part of my series looking back at the history of CyberNations at any time, however last Sunday was the sixth anniversary of the end of the Third Great War. Two months after the conclusion of GWIII I ceased being a student spending time playing a game rather than studying and exited a sixth month stint of unemployment. After that I never really knew what was going on in the Cyberverse or Digiterra or whatever you want to call it. Unable to stay up into the night when the largely American dominated game was most active I consequently fell out of the loop on events and the reason for the latest war. Last year, after I became the oldest and longest continuous member of the NPO, a fellow member working on the CNwiki entry asked me why, given my in-game age, I didn't have all the ribbons for all the wars the alliance had fought in. This is why, and a lot of time unless I'm attacked I don't really know there's a war on. Undoubtedly one of the reasons the age of players is so young is because such massively multiplayer online games require a lot of free time to invest. Until I read about the war that ended last month I'll remain completely oblivious as to the reasons my warchest was depleted by €100 million. Lately given the move toward squad based combat, the demands for greater activity, and adherence to alliance-wide development plans I've felt far more estranged from the game. Last week I thought about quitting - something I've never even considered in seven long years. Even what I think of as recent CN history is a distant collective memory now. Let's recall it...

Promised You A Miracle

Islamic interlace patterns, public domain

Elsa: What've you got there?
Jeremy: The Gutenberg Bible... it was in the Rare Books Room.
Elsa: Think God's gonna' save you?
Jeremy: No... I don't believe in God.
Elsa: You're holding on to that Bible pretty tight.
Jeremy: I'm protecting it.
-The Day After Tomorrow, 2004

I don't recall a time when I ever believed the stories from The Bible or what I was told in Sunday School - which is not to say I had somehow transcended it at the age of ten or earlier. The only bits of the Bible that ever really interested me were the maps as I had a fascination with atlases at the time, and even then I couldn't tell what I was looking at. I can remember being in Primary 5 and having to read Genesis (likely part of Religious Education). The cover of whatever children's edition we were using particularly annoyed me with its colourful depiction of Noah's Ark and a vivid rainbow. This was at least six months before the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis was published, but as a keen Horizon viewer I'd probably been exposed to discussions about the historicity of the flood myths and spending class time on that would have been far more interesting and at least factual. From Horizon and other science programming I was well versed in several theories. In the same year I recall advocating the impact hypothesis in a debate about the extinction of the dinosaurs, and in second year RE I was called on to try to explain the big bang and the Tunguska blast (interdimensional cross-rip?). So it would probably seem odd to the outside observer that I've long treasured, or at least not buried in a box in the basement, a children's illustrated book about the story of Easter.

Slow This Bird Down

Blogging, hgjohn, 2012

In 2010 I managed to drag this blog from the verge of antipathetical annihilation. It's strange that while I had heaps of spare time in 2009, as work had never been easier that year, I managed to produce not even 3,500 words. While 2011 was nowhere near as bad, it was a slump and the quality of the posts was patchy in my opinion. That's the challenge - I could be a perfectionist and turn next to nothing out, or I could pump out posts to meet quotas. 2012 was more of the former at the start of the year, though it was a case of maintaining a work rate. Blindly burning through my long-standing buffer of about twenty drafts would leave me at the mercy of current events to provide material. Luckily my trip to London provided impetus and I got awfully chatty about Gran Turismo 5 at the end of the year. From September through to February I was writing around 4,000 words a month, except in December when I wrote double that and January when I wrote a colossal 11,250 words - that's 55% of the word count of the entirety of 2011. You could say I was burnt out by the end of February.

We Broke Free

Still going strong, Jez Page, 2010

Jack: Well, we're here. We're sitting on the most perfect beach in the world, and all we can think about is-...
Angela: "Where I can hook up my modem?"
-The Net, 1995

I hate phones. I've long disliked taking phone calls, particularly from relatives in the US because of that slight audio delay stepping on everyone's cues. Around the turn of the millennium everyone in school started getting mobile phones. Call me a contrarian and, paradoxically, I'll agree. Amongst those age-groups and in that time, the phones were status symbols and displays of affluence. I've always eschewed those things - for example, I don't wear any type of jewellery. Just before I finished school I went out with friends for an entire day and didn't come home till 1am. My parents threatened to buy me a phone which I vehemently refused. There is nothing I find more annoying than having to drop what I'm doing to answer the home landline, except maybe people paying more attention to an incoming message on their phone than my half of the conversation. I like remaining un-contactable. Here comes the however. However, when I was down in London last year I was away from my desktop computer for four and a half days. I had to rely on that other thing I hate, television, to remain informed about events and it never asked 'Would you like to know more?'.

Rapid Racer

The Duel: Test Drive II, 1989

After I finished the Le Mans 24 Hours in May I considered Gran Turismo 5 done and dusted. When I picked it back up in November last year I started messing around in arcade mode trying out different handicaps. Traction control and anti-lock braking are driving aids and are supposed to be disabled eventually like training wheels, but the majority of players seem to race with them enabled - disabling them, especially online, effectively make them handicaps. This wasn't enough to perpetuate the novelty and once I received the G27 racing wheel I had to learn how to use a clutch and H-pattern gearbox. I mastered that quickly and moved onto heel-toe shifting which, again in time, I mastered. I ditched racing tyres for slippery sports tyres when driving street cars and adjusted to that. Everything can be adapted to. You could argue the Ferrari F40 in all its jolting twitchy instability is a car that could be tamed in a way. While you can certainly learn the F40's behaviour and catch the back drifting out before spinning, it can never become a boring car. It can be frustrating. I quit the Nürburgring 4 Hours last year because it was just too demanding to constantly reign it in on the Nordschleife while trying to create a lead over the second place runner. You have to be hyper-vigilant on a roller-coaster track that sends it in any combination of directions and that's why making it through a lap is rewarding. It's a shame the F40's rival, the Porsche 959, is contractually absent along with the rest of the Porsche stable. It's also a shame the 911 GT1 isn't able to go up against the CLK-GTR, but then they never made a classic game about those two. The Nordschleife, too, is just another sequence of turns you can memorise given enough practice. Hence I've been delving into the Course Maker again to produce another four circuits. I still vacillate between desiring high-speed straight and narrow tracks and twisty rural roads of the variety that might have been seen in Test Drive II. I realise describing corners can be repetitive given the limited vocabulary which is why I've been thinking about buying a video capture device so I can upload the best lap replays to YouTube. It certainly would help interested downloaders to see them in action, or rather to see them as the scene of the action.