(no subject)

Had my first Civ Beyond Earth victory last night. Word of advice, if you're playing the game and starting to be fascinated by the technologies and the implications and the potential promise of stuff, don't let yourself get roped into a Contact victory. It sounds great- find things, build tower, signal aliens, see what shows up- but you literally spend X number of turns building the beacon and when you turn it on it takes 1000 energy and siphons off all surplus energy for thirty turns and then A Winner Is You. No cinematic, no nothing- a little painting or some such with some vague images and a few lines of "we don't know what to expect but we have proof we're not alone!" and that's it.

I haven't had a game be that promising and have that unsatisfying an ending since the original Pick-Your-War-Crime ending of Mass Effect 3. Even Fallout 3's woefully unsatisfying original ending at least had Ron Perlman reading off a speech that was marginally affected by things you'd done.

I'm playing CivBE again, of course. I want a better ending. If all of them are that bleh then I'm going to be peeved; I don't mind an unusual Civ variant but I'd really like something that's at least going to live up to the promise of some of the more exotic bits of the tech web, not just "Have a still picture and a bland half-paragraph". Different civ this time- the Pan-Asian Cooperative sounds like fun- and I'm not sure if I'm gonna go for the same Affinity or if I'm aiming for Supremacy instead. We'll see.

(no subject)

BTW, those of you who've included me in your DR plans in the event of an apocalypse should know that I'm not gonna do the learn-to-sail thing after all. I used that Groupon I bought this summer for an intro to sailing lesson this weekend. Aside from starting off with "There's a small craft warning and winds gusting to 33 miles an hour so technically inexperienced mariners aren't supposed to be out there today", the lesson was pretty good and it was a neat experience, but it just didn't seize my interest enough to want to learn to handle the sail and the tiller at the same time. When you're tootling around Boston Harbor and you realize that you're more fascinated by how magnificent an airliner taking off over the water looks than by what you're actually doing in the boat, you're probably not really in your element.

And by 'your element' I mean I'm gonna stick to kayaking instead. Less separation from the act of being on the ocean or the river or whatever, and while it's mega-annoying to find yourself having to paddle against the wind I have found that to be less frustrating than trying to deal with being becalmed in a boat with no engine.