Lift Off!

The space shuttle Atlantis launched successfully!  Way to go, guys!

Delayed!

Fudge! The launch has been delayed about forty-five minutes due to weather. Nine minutes to go. Ugh.

Shuttle Launch!

T-minus twelve minutes…

(Click Watch NASA TV link in the middle of the page under the Humans in Space header)

Spores Destroy SimCity 5

Well, Maxis has decided not to finish its fifth installment of the SimCity series. Instead, Tilted Mill Entertainment will be developing the game and turning it into something a little different tentatively called SimCity Societies. There’s not much info about how the game is supposed to work yet, but it’s enough to know that it won’t be a city simulator.

This is pretty disappointing. I’ve played every SimCity game on the PC (and one on the SNES) and enjoyed them all. There was still a lot of room for improvement in the game, too, such as getting away from the tile-based building restrictions and getting into a more natural vector-based zoning design.

All is not lost with regards to SimCity games, however. SimCity DS is supposed to come out this summer for the Nintendo DS system. The game appears to be a tweak of the SimCity 3000 engine, and it sounds promising. We’ll see how well the game translates to Nintendo’s latest portable gaming system.

The current thinking behind the abandonment of SimCity 5 is that the Will Wright, co-founder of Maxis and father of SimCity, has focused all his efforts on a revolutionary new game called Spore. The premise of Spore is that you start the game at the molecular level, creating a simple life-form and gradually work your way up to space-faring civilization, customizing the evolution of your creature/society/civilization as you go.

Here are a couple of links if you’re interested in learning more about this mind-blowing, upcoming game:

• Official Spore Website
• Sporewiki
• Spore Gameplay Video (older)
• Spore E3 Presentation Video – Part 1
• Spore E3 Presentation Video – Part 2

It’s looking as though Spore is going to be the be-all-end-all Sim video game.  I can’t wait!

Forty-Five!

Forty-five views yesterday, ha ha!