Civ IV is here!
Here's one for my Christmas list...Civilization IV has finally arrived! I was a huge fan of the previous three Civilization games, so I'm very excited about this one. On top of that, I usually try to take a serious look at any game that gets a glowing review and a score higher than 9.0 at Gamespot.
Civ 4 also has one of the best cinematic trailers I've ever seen for a game. You can watch it here. (There's a second, funny trailer here, too, as well as some videos of game play footage.)
Halo Movie
A bunch of us have regularly been playing Halo on Thursday nights, so I was happy to find out that there is going to be a Halo Movie.
It might actually be good too (unlike most movies based on video games) since it will be produced (and maybe even directed) by Peter Jackson.
Caesar!
I just found out that they are making a new title in the venerable Caesar city-building game series, which includes some of my favourite games of all time. That would have been enough to pique my interest, but now that I've seen the great 3D screenshots, I really can't wait to play Caesar IV!
On a related note, the much-anticipated and hugely expensive new HBO series Rome starts next week! Don't miss that one, it's supposed to be really good. And for my Canadian and European friends who don't get HBO, now's the time to learn how to download your television episodes. Thanks to BitTorrent, you can now think of the Internet as your own personal, super-powered TiVo system.
Backlash
Video Games have been the subject of a lot of negative press ever since the Columbine school shootings, when some people concluded that two students went on a killing spree because they liked violent video games, movies, and music. Nevermind that the most of the non-murderer students that went to school that day also liked violent video games, movies, and music. As a point of fact, most of them weren't crazy, either.
A more recent public outcry against video games has been raised now that people know about the 'Hot Coffee' mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Apparently, the game developers at Rockstar Games left some explicit sexual content in their game, but turned it off so that no one would ever see it. For a programmer, that's a very common thing to do; if you've created something neat in your software but you're forced to remove it, you sometimes don't have the heart to actually delete the whole thing. Instead, you keep it around (but safely hidden) just in case some day you want to show it to someone.
Unfortunately for a few Rockstar Games programmers (who are probably unemployed now), a few hackers noticed their little addition to GTA: San Andreas and figured out a way to reactivate it. They created a mod (a small program that alters the game) which they called 'Hot Coffee'. Now anyone who has the technical skill to find, download, and install Hot Coffee on their computer can see the previously hidden sex scenes.
Of course, anyone who has the technical skill to type dirty words into Google could find plenty of stuff that's a lot more explicit than that.
The family values crowd (and a few fear-mongers) in the US have taken great offense to Hot Coffee. And now there's more easy ammunition for the video gaming backlash: a few days ago a (crazy) man in Korea actually died of exhaustion after gaming for almost 3 solid days at a cybercafe. But somehow I think the story is going to be spun to suggest that it was his video games--not his obvious insanity, poor health or bad luck--that led to him dying from exhaustion.
On the bright side, this whole situation has led to some more funny web comics and interesting merchandizing.
Wasted Productivity
So I've spent a lot of time lately playing Planarity, a surprisingly hard game that Kris sent to me. The idea is to drag the vertices of a graph around until none of its lines overlap (which by definition proves that the graph is planar.) I'm betting that computer programmers (or anyone else who's used to solving complex problems by repeatedly refining an imperfect solution) will find this game easier to play.
For a much cuter game, try Tontie. It's like whack-a-mole on steroids-it's mostly a test of your ability to stay perfectly concentrated on a complicated task (which keeps getting harder and harder.) If you want to see something impressive, go watch Warren play Tontie (and for a good laugh, try putting your hands over his eyes when he gets to level 14 or so. 
)
