Fuzzy Logic

So, thanks to Jeff Nadeau, I got hooked on WoW recently.  Unfortunately, I had a problem–How would I play this completely addicting game without the ability to play it on my laptop?  After all, the inability to play CSS/TF2 on my laptop with Wine was one of the big reasons I didn’t fail out of Engineering last year.  Luckily, after hacking at this for a few hours I managed a fix so I can properly lose all of my social life.

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Great news today, people: Valve has announced more progress on the TF2 Heavy Update.  They’re including 2 news maps, 3 new weapons, and a completely new gametype (we can only hope for VIP).  Now, I’m not saying that I’m addicted to Heavy or anything, but this is going to be both a blessing and a curse.  Not only will I be away all week next week, but everyone is going to be playing heavy. Everyone.  Medics are going to love the free heal and assist points, and snipers are going to love the free headshots from thousands of heavies deciding that they’ll stop in chokehold points to spin up their gun.  If you thought Pyro Fortress 2 was bad, just wait for Heavy Fortress.  Of course, I’m sure my good friend Jeff Nadeau will love to go all sneaky-snake on the new heavies and up his backstab killcount.  Oh well–so it goes.

Many places are reporting that Sid Meier is bringing a new Civ game to the PC.  This time it’s more of a remake than the recent ones have been.  He’s bringing back a slightly obscure game called Colonization for me to waste my life on.  Now, normally this is a good thing.  A new civilization game comes out, I promptly waste 100 hours of my life playing twenty games or so, and then I realize I haven’t showered in a month and I stop playing.  Unfortunately, this game may make me go even past that.  Why, do you ask?

If I had to guess, I’d say the HUGE WAGONS have something to do with it.  I don’t know why, but I’m a sucker for wagons.  I think it all started with the Oregon Trail, but this game looks like it will also exploit my weakness.  Of course, this game doesn’t just feature wagons–it also features the Dutch.  I started my love affair with the Dutch colonization and imperialism movement when I started playing Pirates! a few years back.  This game should be able to help me with my Dutch addition (provided Sid doesn’t put in another ridiculous Ballroom Dancing minigame).

Overall, I think this should be a pretty interesting game.  Civ IV has such a global and epic feel that I’ll be interested in seeing if they can replicate that feeling in a game that takes place on a much smaller scale.  Also, since Colonization should be focused on a relatively short period of time (ideally) it shouldn’t fall into the same traps that Civ IV did (You know, like when your ).  Sid Meier has a history of providing interesting sim games and I hope he keeps it up (and I really hope his next project is a Alpha Centauri remake!).