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Beautiful Night Shots

I must have played Sim City 2000 for five years straight.  I made a thousand cities, some small farmer villages other suburban burgs lined with trees and schools.  I made epic metropolises that covered the ground like moss and rose into the sky, well beyond the long lost streets.  The later simcity games were even more visceral.  Simcity 4 was practically a city planning guide and my cities, all interconnected and interdependent, were amorphous and uncontrollable.  They ate away at the land and leveled entire mountains, expanding without any particular guide or reason.  Some cities I let flounder, others I forced higher and wider, hungry organisms intent on becoming organisms of their own.

While the later games, simcity 3000 and simcity 4, were visually stunning and phenomenal games, they lacked part of what made simcity 2000 special and not the least of that was the extended manual that came with the special edition (or perhaps commemorative edition, I don’t remember anymore.)  It was a standard game manual (back when games actually came with those.  Allow me a moment to weep over my long lost Baldur’s Gate manual, a dusty tome with faded pages and gold ink.  That was a masterpiece.)  The simcity 2000 manual came with a dozen essays and a similar number of images written about cities.  They described cities as homes of people and their lives and similarly as mindless corporate jails where the inhabitants are little more than guests.  They applauded the glorious gentrification of a decaying, forgotten neighborhood and bemoaned the crime infested grime of the city center.

Simple as that manual was, those writers are really what gave me an interest in ‘the city’ as something more than a crowded nuisance, a place to live while hoping to live elsewhere.  The photos found at .  A ghostly Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower looming over a darkened city, bright streets dizzying with activity, all cities as lived in and inevitably forgotten as Rome.  It is history, like a textbook, but it is current history and so it is very alien and tells a story without ignoring the details.

Heinlein’s power suits, shiny knight armor, star wars storm trooper uniforms. Uniform’s and armor make the man, at least some of the time. I recently came across two articles on armor, old and new, which might fill in some research gap for anyone writing about combat.

Ever wondered how many pieces of gold it takes to suit up a modern soldier? Here you go.

For those people with more historical inclinations, a page of photographs of medieval armor and a diagram outlining what each piece is called might just be useful, eh?

Enjoy!

During one my general perusals of the internet I came upon this gallery of images depicting various proposed space structures for habitation. Part of the novel I’m been working on includes some space colonies so it seemed relevant to poke around a little bit.

As cool as the images are, there is some fascinating research that has gone into the feasibility of these possible habitations. The Dyson Sphere, shown in one of the Star Trek images, in particular has a whole host of science behind it. I also really liked the article on Kemperer Rosettes.

Enjoy!

The Demo for Empire Total War came out today. For the uninitiated, the Total War series of games is a cross between Risk’s turn style-conquer the world gameplay, Civilizations diplomacy, and the unit battles of something like Age of Empires. The previous games in the series: Shogun Total War, Medieval Total War, Rome Total War, and Medieval Total War 2 have each improved the scope of the world, added better graphics, more complex interactions between cultures, and taken the game into different time periods.

The newest entry, Empire Total War, finally delves into Napoleonic era warfare. For anyone who has seen the Sharpe series starring Sean Bean (or read the books by Bernard Cromwell) combat of the age was quite a bit more elegant than simply lines of infantry mauling each other with musketfire. This was the grand age of artillery, cavalry, and most of all, naval warfare, which is itself a new addition to the series.

Sadly the demo, released yesterday on Steam, lacked the overall world map, and as such, none of the interaction between countries, so I can’t speak for the diplomacy, trade, and general global politicking, but it featured a naval battle and a land battle to test out.

The naval battle was gorgeous. There’s something undeniably magestic about a 100+ gun first rate ship of line launching a broadside against an equally large and well armed enemy vessel. A quick google search for screenshots will reveal just how great they’ve got the ships looking. As far gameplay, it’s a tad slow and more than a little chaotic. Ships don’t turn all that quickly and so it makes for a roundabout affair sometimes, but it’s a joy to watch and there are more than a few tactical decisions to make: which ships engage which enemies, what cannon shot to use, whether to grappe enemies or not, whether to even engage or not.

The land battles are even more impressive. The featured map is the Battle of Brandywine in the American Revolution. You play as the english as they flank the americans and rout their forces en route to Philadelphia.

WIth control over a few units of hussars, a unit of dragoons, a half a dozen units of line infantry, some light skirmishers, and a number of cannon, you get a pretty good taste of what an english army could throw at an enemy in the 1700s.

Overall, I’m impressed. Games like this that provide a fairly solid historical foundation, but let the player go from there, tend to provide more than a little creative inspiration. And besides, sometimes it’s just fun to line a dozen cannon, a few thousand computerized soldiers, a couple units of cavalry and then let them just run at each other.

The game should be released in about a week so, keep an eye out!

What would you do to survive the Apocalypse? Rob the nearest gun shop? Rustled some cattles? Lock yourself in the bank? What about food? The number of Twinkie factories in the world is disturbingly low.

If you’re not sure, you’re in luck, chef and chocolatier (the greatest job title ever) Will Sprunk has been thinking about this very topic and jotted a few thoughts down. Sadly some of the suggestes are specific to London so…much sure you’re across the pond when the Apocalypse strikes, eh?

For the Fallout players ,around I intend to collect some Iguana on a Stick and wait for the Brotherhood of Steel to pick me and my old gray gameboy out of the wasteland.

America, 200 years after a nuclear holocaust. Washington, D.C is a blasted wasteland, irradiated, barren, and home to a myriad of small groups trying to a carve a life out of the deserted ruins that once housed the most powerful government on earth. With a handful of old weapons and scattered junk, a lone wanderer explores the dystopian remnants of society that optimistically awaited the future of technology in search of his newly and mysteriously disappeared father. Will he find shelter amongst the scattered townships of the desert or die at the hands of a raider with nothing better to do?

Does this sound like a book synopsis?

It certainly could be, but it’s not. It happens to be my rough overview of Fallout 3, a computer game by Bethesda, known best for the Elder Scrolls games (which could be books in their own right.)

I’ve been playing Fallout for a little over a week now. I could review it as a video game and on those merits it’s safe to say that it’s fun, but for Servusamanu, I’d rather review it as a piece of literature.

Video games tend to have a bad reputation as a medium for story-telling. There’s only so much I can argue against that, but there are definite exceptions and Fallout 3 is one of them.

It’s a world, a huge world. The story is engrossing, but seeing a barren nuclear wasteland and getting to walk around is a haunting experience. Books can describe and movies can show, but only games let you explore. Running out of ammo in the middle of nowhere is frightening and dramatic. I can’t help, but come up with story ideas. Why is this school infested with raiders? Why are all these cars on fire? How many people have wandered into this wasteland and ran out of supplies? Could I start a new village here?

As a medium for ideas, computers games probably aren’t for everyone, and I can’t imagine anyone who already plays particularly needs an excuse to get or avoid Fallout 3, but if everything I write in the next few weeks has a dystopian bent, you’ll know why.

Respectful Insolence is a running compendium of science and history (and more!) written by one of my favorite online writers, Orak. Orak is the nom de plume of the resident insolence hurler, a research oncologist who writes on sketchy medicine, holocaust denial, Dr. Who, and a host of science topics all with a careful spattering of snarky wit and reasoned skepticism. I’ve slowly increased my blogroll to encompass as many topics as possible (for ideas as well as knowledge), but I also owe Respectful Insolence a more personal shout-out since it was one of my early inspirations to become a ‘blog writer,’ if I indeed have any claim to that title. It’s well worth reading.

For an example of a relatively recent, science-oriented article that I particular enjoyed: Drug Testing!