To those that haven’t read Krishnan’s blog post next (or below) this one yet: what the hell are you standing around here for? Go read that first! For those of you that did, you already heard of the WiC Beta closure. It may have been a fun time for some, a frustrating time for others, but to me it was but the realization of a hidden Nuklear ambition. Having finished at a decent position overall (and at my peak touching 359 on the ladder board) towards the end, I can’t help but think that this’ll be an utterly great game to play and get hooked on almost immediately - but only in single player.

The negative reaction to the multiplayer aspects stems too much from it’s similarity to Battlefield 2 and 2142. Finding a good game that lasts more than 5-10 minutes thanks to horrible balance in terms of both Rank and Numbers is somewhat rare. Grinding against the same problems repetitively on only two maps made it even worst of a hassle, and eventually, after a full day of 6-10 minute games where our team couldn’t get it’s act together in time for being swamped by the other, stacked team of high-ranking players I quit for a few days out of sheer frustration. However, don’t let this little tale ruin the experience for you - while it can be hassle to generally play online on your own, if you can find and convince a few good friends to play with you online and in the same clan (and on Clan matches no less) then the Multiplayer aspect is an utter, utter blast. After all, its always more fun to play together with friends than random strangers (not to mention a whole lot more co-ordinated). Plus consider that this case was probably isolated, and if you DO get a good team and fairly even skill levels on both sides, like BF2 it can be a blast

That said, its probably best to stop beating a dead horse. Hopefully, the developers will get something planned by the time the game ships.

Now, to move onto more…darker things. For long-time System Shock fans, there’s a somewhat long (yet interesting) article on what is the Gaming History’s most unique villains: SHODAN. You can find it here, and is aptly titled “The Girl Who Wanted to be God”. Even if your not a System Shock fan, its really recommended reading the article anyway, as it describes a breed - nay, a species of awesome villains that’ll probably never be seen again in the future of gaming.

To finish off this less-than-spectacular blog post is a bit of news regarding Firaxis’ new expansion pack to Civilization IV, titled “Beyond the Sword“. The recently released expansion pack gives a vast number of units, civilizations, leaders and other upgrades to the Civ IV games. More awesome than that though, is the way their getting publicity for it: through web comics. Firaxis apparently invited many major web comics to make fan strips for the release in a special event known as “Civilization Daydreams”. Artists from popular web comics such as Player vs Player Online, Ctrl Alt Delete, 8-Bit Theater and quite a few others have given strips for the release. These special strips can be found here: http://www.civilization.com/daydreams/

Enjoy reading them. Until next time something interesting happens (and someone else doesn’t beat me to posting it here *glares at some people*) - this is Singh, signing off.