Ares is staring at me

Not the god of war though, sadly. This Ares is still pretty bad-ass, though; he's a beta fish I'm taking care of while I'm here at school over spring break. Someday he'll be out of his testing phase; we're looking at a May 2006 release date if the stress test goes as hoped. *rim shot*

Ahem. So yeah, I'm here at school instead of going to the sunny beaches of Cancun and getting really drunk and flashing people with video cameras, as I've been led by the media to believe is the normal mode of behavior for college students on spring break. Given that it's below freezing and the ground is covered with snow, I have to say that it's something of a let down. But hey, I'm making money, so it all evens out.

I've also been playing Civ 4, Homeworld 2, and ChronoTrigger, all excellent games. Civ 4 is wonderful and a worthy successor to Civ 2 (I never played Civ 3, but I've heard it was solid, mostly from Poke's ramblings about it) and is immensely fun. The addition of religions to the Civ model is really interesting-they're powerful for cultural imperialism, plus they let you monkey with history in the most hilarious fashion - like my Spanish Jewish theocracy, ofr the predominantly Buddhist American empire I'm leading at the moment. Though I probably get more of a kick out of that than normal people.

ChronoTrigger is just classic. 'Nuff said. We'll ignore the fact that I never played SNES games when I was younger and that my declaring the game to be "classic" means nothing; it's really fun though.

Homeworld 2 has all the good things of Homeworld, none of the minor flaws, and massively sexier graphics. There's a mission INSIDE an asteroid field/dustcloud. Did you see the Battlestar Galactica episode where the fleet was stuck in a really dense asteroid/dust field and it was all gorgeous SFX? Yeah. That's the HW2 mission. And when your ships fire, it creates static electricity lightning. It's gorgeous. Plus the whole game has this exotic quasi-Arabic overtone and fantastic music. Yay game series that improve with time.

I can't really remember where I intended to go with this post, except that, thanks to the fairly crappy, very pulpy Werewolf Tribe novels, I may be yet again starting to get my writing mojo back. Now if I move very, very slowly, maybe I won't spook it...
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Waiting for Exalted 2.0 - those hosers at Amazon had better get it to me soon, I need to get excited about Solars finally having Charms on par with the other types of Exalts.