Video Games

I bought Julia Civilization IV for Christmas. It’s something I wanted myself but my computer only just reaches the minimum specs. But we installed it anyway and on the lowest settings it does run (although it runs “fine” it’s really unstable after about half an hour and prone to crashing).

If you don’t know, Civilization is a game where you control a civilization from ancient stone age times through to the near future (the last technology you develop allows travel to Alpha Centauri). This version adds a lot to the basic idea though. The biggest addition is religion. It was always going to be a touchy subject but since religion has had a huge impact on Civilization they couldn’t ignore it forever. All the religions in the game are basically handled the same, the only differences being what you need to do to found them. The fact that you can found them can cause events that are vaguely blasphemous (like founding both Buddhism and Christianity in London) but this is really no worse than warfare between two countries that never fought each other in the real world.

I can’t really describe all the coolness here but anyone remotely interested in the genre should go out and buy this game.

I just got the new (well it’s not that new now) Timesplitters game for the PS2, and wow is it cool.

It’s sort of a cross between Timesplitters 2, Halo and the Goldeneye sequel on the N64 (Perfect Dark?). Think Timesplitters 2 but add the ability to get into vehicles and separate grenades and deployable guns. The graphics are improved and are less cartoony but the whacky sense of humour is still there - whenever you kill a monkey it shouts “Chimpicide!”.

I found a cool little PS2 game recently, Sonic Mega Collection Plus. It’s a collection of Sonic games from the Mega Drive/Genesis and Game Gear, including Sonic The Hedgehog (for each), Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic Spinball, Sonic Chaos, Sonic Blast, Sonic Drift, Sonic 3D and Dr. Robotonik’s Mean Bean Machine (for both).

For anyone who likes Sonic it is well worth getting. There are a few notes first though.

It does include Knuckles in Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but they must be unlocked. The Game Gear games are single player (emulating two Game Gears that could link up would have been fun). The unlockable non-Sonic games are interesting but not really worth going to the hassle to unlock.

It would have been nice to have the Master System versions of Sonic and Sonic 2, but you can’t have everything.

I was in a computer game shop today.

It was own of those places that does trades and has a lot of preowned stock. Much to my surprise they have a second hand Super Nintendo with one game for the same price as a GameCube with 4 games! Admittedly the one game was Legend of Zelda but still…

Here’s a demo of what may become a game: Cash City Wars.

There are various reasons for the title I won’t go into right now… Basically the game will involve you moving from city to city in some way (quite exactly what the mechanics of the game will be I don’t know yet). The cool thing is that it will use real geographic data. At the moment there is only data for the UK but depending on availability I could add the whole world.

Although they don’t like it, the town names are in fact clickable.

Update This page previously contained a statement regarding the closure of OrbWars down over a year ago - BUT OrbWars will be returning soon, check the website over at http://www.orbwars.co.uk for more details once I get it all finished!

This will hopefully become a nice place for all the info I currently have on Galaxia Reborn.

I realised putting stuff in normal blog posts was silly since the GR info isn’t really supposed to be time sensitive and once it falls off the front page, former Galaxia players who stumble over here won’t be bothered to find it.

The current version is now available: Galaxia Reborn Login with “Q” as your username and “q” as your password.

Well one can now create an account and login. So far it doesn’t give you anything but it does respect users with regards to what object orders you can perform. i.e. you can’t rename objects that aren’t your own.