News-o-matic
August 28, 2006
- Xbox 360 honcho Peter Moore said once that "... even your mom will be playing games here...". Naturally, a guy decided to test his statement by sitting down with his mother and seeing how she fared with the console. Interestingly, her favourite game was Condemned: Criminal Origins, where the player spends a lot of his/her time beating hobos to death.
- All the cool kids know that Civilization is a great game, but it's a massive time sink. Well, it looks like it has claimed another victim - Iain M Banks missed the deadline for his latest book because he was playing too much Civ. Apparently this is the first time he's ever asked for an writing extension. Hopefully he will finish the book before he realizes that an expansion pack, Civilization IV: Warlords has been released.
- I never played the System Shock games, but I found a long and quite interesting examination of the game's villain, Shodan, called The Girl Who Wanted To Be God. The analysis is perhaps a little overdone, but only a little, and it paints a good picture of many of the psychological facets that made Shodan so memorable.
- For those who love retro even when it's chunky, heavy and hard to put in your pocket, there's a nifty hack that makes an old style rotary handset into a mobile phone. It's even good for clocking burglars, and then calling the police.
- Apparently, cows have regional accents. Cowabunga.
- Astronomers have voted to revoke Pluto's status as a planet, reclassifying it instead as a "dwarf planet". These changes were made because under the previous definition, there were fifty or more heavenly bodies in the Solar System that fit into the planetary category. The change met with some fierce opposition, but was eventually pushed through. You don't want to mess with a enraged posse of astronomers.
- Super news that Xbox Live will soon feature classic board games like Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. I played an awful lot of Settlers while I was in Canada, and had a really good time with it. I look forward to overweight American teenagers calling me a gay homosexual over voice chat when I ask to trade my wood for sheep.
- Another Windows Vista feature bites the dust - full HD playback will not be supported in 32-bit Vista, only in the 64-bit version. The main reason for this is that 64-bit Vista uses signed drivers, which provides a more secure content path for media than the 32-bit version of Vista, that still uses unsigned code and might be compromised. You can smell the stink of the media companies all over this one, but it would seem that they're just hurting themselves by locking anyone with an older PC out of the HD game.