More on Spore

09/26/08 02:00:45 am

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Let me introduce Cadee, the pinnacle of evolution in my Spore-iverse.

After a relatively easy progression from the cell stage through the tribal stage, I found myself in some trouble at the civilization stage. The green nation petitioned me, "help us go to war with the blue nation," and because the blue nation was safely far away, I agreed. Unfortunately, declaring war on the blue nation was tantamount to declaring war on its ally, the orange nation, who was right next door to me at the time. Whoops. While struggling to defend my little city against the orange guys, and take a city or two for ourselves in the process, the mighty red nation gobbled up all the other nations in the blink of an eye. Generous bribes and compliments to the reds then became the order of the day.

So there I am with two cities under my control, while the red nation controls the rest of the whole darn planet. Huh. Well, we were on quite cordial terms, so it was easy to allow my cities to sit around and generate a lot of money while nobody came attacking. But war was inevitable when the goal of the civ stage is "conquer the planet," so when enough funding had accumulated, it was off to attack the neighboring cities. For such a fleeting moment, I had control of 4 cities, and this unlocks ... aircraft! But my funds had dwindled and the reds were quickly decimating my territories. It seemed like the end, when suddenly, their thirst for vengeance was quelled (or something), and the reds retreated, leaving me one small, land-locked city to keep. Little did they know, this single act of non-aggression would be their eventual undoing.

For now we had aircraft! Far more efficient in city-capturing, if only we could afford them... No matter; with the reds appeased, it was again a simple matter of waiting for the cash to roll in. Once a surplus was built up, it was all downhill for the reds from there - we went from one city to six in no time. And then this little icon lit up at the bottom of the screen... "I..C... B... M?" As Rirath called it, I had found the "'win the game' button" - one press (and $36k) later, the globe was mine.

And now... to space!

Chrome, Spore, iPhone?

09/13/08 05:39:24 pm

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Google released a new browser last week, called Chrome. Gave it a shot, and while it's certainly the fastest browser I've seen yet, it holds no real enticement for power users due to its lack of customization and extensibility. And while Google promises that add-ons are forthcoming, I can't see them being too pleased with a potential AdBlock for Chrome. Not that their displeasure will prevent the release of such things, but a nice part of Mozilla's approach is that you can find nearly any available add-on on their centralized site, and that top-recommended extensions - such as AdBlock - are brought to the forefront for your consumption. I can't see Google mimicking a distribution center like that without some restrictions. Still, if you want a very fast browser and don't care about add-ons and such, Chrome might be a good choice for you.

I have been playing Spore, which has sparked a great deal of controversy over its DRM restrictions, while failing to impress some anticipating reviewers. I for one enjoy the game, not so much for the gameplay which is indeed pretty simplistic (so far - I've heard the Space stage gets a bit tougher), but for the fun of taking your single-celled organism and designing iteration after iteration up into a full-blown creature of your own imagination. It's like building that monster out of play-dough when you were a kid, but then having it come to life. If you don't find fun in that sort of thing, then no, you probably wouldn't enjoy Spore. As for the DRM, I agree that it's ridiculous, but I love the logic leap that people make when they say, "well the DRM is awful, so I'm telling everyone to pirate it instead." While I won't say that such a sentiment is right, it's true: this generation can and will pirate something - music, movies, games - if it doesn't like the restrictions placed upon it by its owner(s). That's not going to change, and I think publishers would do themselves a favor to wise up and realize that things like DRM are only hurting their legitimate customers.

Finally, I got an iPhone. Well, not so much "got," as "was provided with." My cell phone is currently a courtesy of my employer, and up until now I was sporting another smartphone, the Treo 755p. It had so many weird problems I don't know where to begin listing 'em. Worst of all, it would often reboot upon receiving an incoming call. It would tell me I had "insufficient memory" when as far as I could tell, more than half the memory was free. It once erased everything on the expansion miniSD card I put into it. And as something of a finale, when I was gathering up my contact info to transfer to the new phone, I noticed it had - for no known reason - assigned my special ringtone for personal contacts to just about everyone on my contact list. In short, it was a device I could force into working, but never really enticed me to want to work with it.

Others in the office seemed to feel similarly only meagerly satisfied with their phones, so when they found out the new iPhone 3G supports MS Exchange (an essential), the switch was quickly approved. While I'm not an Apple fan (this is, in fact, the first Apple product I have ever owned), I must admit this thing is leaps and bounds over my previous smartphone in almost every way. I love how the browser is a real browser, rather than the poor excuse for one that most phones have which will ruin the page layout and can't handle Javascript or any other web technology more advanced than HTML. The touch screen in general is just a good idea too... I love scrolling with my finger, zooming in and out with double-clicks, and just pushing stuff to use it rather than having to navigate there with directional keys as I once did. There are some gripes as well - why no video camera? why no copy and paste? - but overall it's probably the best thing you can get for the money in smartphones.