My strategy for expansion was normally to torch a town/city until there was no-one left alive (yeah, my hand was all veiny and purple and evil looking and my temple’s spikes curved so far they were almost pointing back inwards), then send in a couple of missionaries. Didn’t do wonders for the size of my influence area around that town, but it helped solve the overpopulation in my base town… just bring them over to the new colony and all is well.

Eventually I got stuck while attempting to take over a town that had one guy who was away worshipping… that one dude meant I couldn’t make the town neutral, there weren’t enough inhabitants (they were all dead) for miracles to do anything, and that town was the only one I had within my sphere of influence. I tried a few long-shot fireballs towards his temple to see if I could score a lucky kill on that one guy, but to no avail…

I’ll let you know about Spore… although actually it’s quite likely I’ll forget… post a comic a week from now that’s on a related subject to remind me

When trying to make something for free – guerilla contentent creation – a dual boot system, or if you are lucky, two different systems, can be extremely useful. It gives you that little bit more flexibility when assembling a tool kit.

these days though, it seems like Windows is the least useful OS in terms of open production.

I’ve always been a sucker for god games, they suit my complex.

That said, I have so often been let down by them. Black & White being my biggest disappointment. The creature AI was laughable, and some of the balancing was way off… all I heard, despite every effort, were villagers screaming ‘Wood, we need wood’. Before too long I was embarking on a massive forestry project and wondering,’ Am I not supposed to be these peoples’ god?’.

Framsticks is a remarkably in-depth tool, but I think if you’re that way inclined it is also rather fun. I know a whole bunch of scientists, geeks, artists and engineers that use that program for various reasons.

There is another similar, but far simpler simulation called Darwin Pond – http://www.ventrella.com/Darwin/darwin.html – although I found it quite fun, it misses an awful lot of features.

Please tell your father that I’m rather flattered.

As it is, I’m running pure Linux. I haven’t had a Windows install on my systems in a little over 5 years and I love it. Not only that, my mother loves the Kubuntu setup I gave her and my two younger brothers are now at the point where they boot into Windows so rarely that they’ve given me the OK to drop windows file sharing if I find a file sharing setup that’ll be less hassle for me to administer.

Damned if I’m gunking up my PC with SecuROM… my solution is to download the cracked version (no DRM included) and give it my perfectly legitimate and paid for serial number so it can go online.

I would return it, but I’ve wanted to play this thing since forever ago when the early demos came out. To be honest from what I’ve seen since then the game’s not what the early videos made it out to be… the graphics have taken a cartoony turn and certain other features have been cut.

Sounds like the stages are somewhat disconnected too – building up a surplus of one stage’s currency doesn’t carry over into the next stage… I was imagining seamless increase in scale, but it was not to be… so much potential there that was never realised.

But anyhow, I’ll see what it’s like when my torrent’s done downloading.

I called my dad to tell him about it, and mentioned where I found out about it, and he now wants to marry you, Adam (in a heterosexual way). So if middle aged, balding totally blind computer programmers are your thing, it will be a match made in heaven.

I’m a bit disappointed that there is no concept of evolution…

It’s not a game, but Framsticks might do the trick for the geekier person.

http://www.framsticks.com/

Just out of interest, has anyone else seen the reviews on Amazon for Spore… I think EA messed up a bit there getting too heavy on the DRM issue. As one reviewer said, and many repeated, it’s like you rent the game from them now.

More bravery is required for some of the other distributions as you need to rummage around in the operating system, setting everything up yourself.

I say undignified death because one of my memory sticks became corrupted… this led to my machine suffering from digital Alzheimers – it would lose stuff, crash and behave quite oddly.

This in turn really messed up the operating system and quite a few of my files… until the whole mess degenerated into a lifeless brick. It was entirely the machine’s fault.

…and that’s when I canabilised as much as I could for my new machine.

It depends upon how brave you are feeling. I quite like Unbuntu:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

I installed it on a (very) old desktop machine and had some great results with it… until the machine died a rather undignified death.

I rebelled against technology for the longest time because I was sick of hearing about computers and tripping over robot parts.

For a while I had both OO and microsoft office installed together, just in case, but I’ve found that I can just remove the microsoft one now since I really don’t use it.

Open Office can read Microsoft Word documents, but will not save to that file type… Instead you can save to open document format (which can be opened inn Word). There are some nice tutorials on the site for how to deal with the changeover.

Similarly, the spreadsheet and presentation programs will open office equivalents too.