Phobos Central

If you want to get in touch with me for some reason, try here and you'll be listed in my mailbox along with all the NASA press releases and stuff.

First of all: My Favourite Games, & Why I Love Them!

By the way, if anyone at Microprose, Gametek, LucasArts or Nintendo want to pay me for promoting their games here like this, I can be easily reached, just click that mail link above and tell me how much you're offering :-)

Civilization: The first PC game I ever owned. Civ was astonishing. I had a tremendous nuclear war on Chieftain level (the easiest) in my FIRST GAME - it's that easy to get into. Having wiped out the French on their strategically important island, I found the Babylonians - an empire more powerful than mine - stationing troops in my land. For several years there were artillery units camped out in the hills near one of my major cities. I paid tribute to them for a long time to prevent an attack, while invading Egypt, a neighbour of theirs, to increase my own power base. Shortly afterwards they too invaded. Of course it led to war. They nuked one of my bases on their coast (a former Egyptian outpost), I nuked Babylon - their empire collapsed and the French rose from the dead as the rebel faction. My tanks and bombers finally mopped up the Babylonians - but the rebel French nuked my ships as they came to invade them! From then on I was hooked.

Eventually Civilization 2 came out and of course I bought it. It is indeed an improvement over the old one. The only real objection I have is that the Stealth Fighter looks like an F-15. I remember fighting a Cold War with the Carthaginians for centuries; they were just about to erase the Americans when I first encountered their troops. I was concerned that I might be in no real state to resist them directly - so I sent Musketeers as gifts to New York, the last American city standing on the ithsmus between my empire and theirs, and used my own troops to block alternative routes. They wasted their resources attacking the poor Americans while I colonized around the side and eventually had a border with the Carthaginians myself - which I fortified with tanks from faraway wars. Eventually I turned on the Americans, and took New York. Finally a Carthaginian howitzer shot at one of my tank divisions on the border. I had about 20 fortresses with 4 tanks in each, plus some infantry and hows and a carrier fleet offshore laden with bombers, F15s and missiles of both kinds. I still have the Powergraph (a line graph showing the relative might of every empire in the game); their fall was vertical, and from top to bottom. Heh heh. (Brag brag)

If you have Civ2 and like to wield overwhelming power against pathetic enemies, play as the Coalition on the Gulf War scenario, available in some places on the Internet. It's practically a no-lose situation. Just don't declare war on Israel, as the US has spent 50 years arming them to the teeth and they CAN kick your ass.

I also love the Elite series. I had the original Elite on the old NES, and was amazed to see its sheer size. My Cobra Mk-III hunted down the Prototype Constrictor that pirates had hijacked from the Feds; delivered secret plans across a galaxy, under Thargoid fire the whole way; and became infested with suspiciously Tribble-like aliens (you can't just beam them onto a nearby Klingon Bird-of-Prey, you have to fly near the Sun and open up your Fuel Scoops, letting stellar hydrogen plasma at about 6000 degrees into your cargo bay - beats microwaving hamsters, doesn't it... but more about that later.) I've just got hold of Elite Plus for the PC from Ian Bell's page and it looks a lot more real than it used to.

I never owned Frontier but I have played it quite a bit. It's good, and not bugged. It's not as good as First Encounters (which is exquisite but appears to be missing some parts and is bugged all the way to hell). In my first game I played fair, flew around the Galaxy (the REAL galaxy - you can visit all the nearby stars - Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Altair, Arcturus, etc.) in a Spar Attack Fighter killing pirates and trading small cargos. I gradually upgraded to a Mantis Cruiser outfitted as a warship, with 20MW lasers on both turrets, thick shields and a huge missile rack, and toured Phekda (another real star, it's in the Plough), the most dangerous star system in the Galaxy. Eventually I found the Van Maanens Star (obscure white dwarf, a religious monastery system where EVERYTHING fun is illegal) smuggling routes from Tau Ceti and Sol (which are the Galaxy's main exporters of luxury goods - fetching a fine price on the black market at Van Maanens) , made a fortune, bought an Imperial Explorer (looks a bit like a Federation Starship with a much reduced saucer), turned it into a battleship with a plasma accelerator and 100 shields, and took out every ship - pirate and police - in the Veliaze system.

Only later did I find the secret plot. Paying for a top-price seat at Turner's Requiem (he was an explorer, in a new Quest starship, searching for the Thargoid homeworlds), I was offered a mission for the Alliance. To avoid spoiling the plot, I'll stop there, but, as it says on the box, I ended up returning to New Rossyth on Argent's Claim, Alioth in a Thargoid Warship - the ultimate ship. I love this series and can't wait for the next. Unfortunately Gametek seem to have dumped the series, and, having released such a monstrously bugged game on the public, everyone's glad to see the back of them. There are two projects underway to produce a sequel, all by fans - The Elite Project, and Galileo. The best fan site is this one here which carries lots of info on First Encounters & also links to the sequel projects.

I'd also like to draw your attention to the Nintendo series, the Legend of Zelda. I got Zelda 2 first and loved it. It's huge, hard, and takes months to explore. Completing this thing is a real achievement. If you get it on a NES emulator, keep your hand away from the save and reload buttons - cheats may prosper, but they won't get that satisfaction of the final victory over the nightmare monster at the end.

The series has the most hideously complicated plot I've ever seen. The first game, Zelda 1, is a fairly standard collect items / rescue princess game. However, its sequel has you as the same hero attempting to rescue a different princess, also called Zelda, who got put under a sleeping spell centuries ago. And it's much harder and more complex - even finding the last village and sixth palace are difficult!

Just as you gat the hang of that part of the plot though, Zelda 3 introduces a new hero with the same name, and sets the game sometime between Zelda 1 and the time when the Zelda from Zelda 2 was put to sleep. Eep. And not only that but then Zelda 4 turns you into a villain, destroying an island and all its innocent inhabitants just in order to escape! I mean, ok, some places are boring & there's nothing to do at the weekend, but seriously...?

All four Zelda games are available for free over the Internet on emulators, but that's illegal so don't do it unless you own the original game (ahem.) There is a fifth game for the N64, a couple of obscure episodes for the CD-i and a possibility on the horizon of a Zelda 6 for Colour Game Boy. Go to Zelda Headquarters - excellent fan site.

Finally I'd like to mention the Maniac Mansion games. The original Maniac Mansion was a very early point 'n click game with a large number of no-win situations and ways to die. You had three characters you chose at the start, each with unique skills, and moved them about this huge house solving puzzles etc. It was notable for the house's psychotic residents (including Dead Cousin Ted, the mummy in the bath) and the spectacular deaths (e.g. send one kid to the cellar to turn the valve and drain the pool; send another down the ladder to collect all the goodies at the bottom; refill the pool. Poor kid drowns.)

Weird Ed and his Hamster are an important part of the plot - to get into the secure room where the Evil Meteor is kept you need its Purple Card Key, which Weird Ed has stolen and hidden under his hamster, which no-one dares touch because Ed's a psycho. It's not giving away too much to say that one kid touches his hamster, and while Ed is busy incarcerating the unfortunate wretch in the house's private dungeon, another kid enters his room and cleans it out. Then you have the Card Key but also a Hamster. Nice people have the character Ed imprisoned return it, at which point Ed forgives them. The rest of us go to the kitchen, open the microwave... PING!... and then give the Exploded Lumps of Hamster to Weird Ed, who promptly goes psycho at the player who gave him the remains and kills them.

Having completed Maniac Mansion it is worthwhile playing Day of the Tentacle - in my opinion the greatest point 'n click of all time. Monkey Island fans - sorry guys. In this you meet Weird Ed five years later. He's spent all that time in intensive psychotherapy, trying to uncover some traumatic event that happened to him five years ago that he's been blocking out. When he tries to remember, all he can think of is a bright light, and a horrible sound... Now he collects stamps. Lines of questioning include 'What was the horrible sound' to which the response is 'It was sort of like...PING! Oh God, I hear it in my dreams to this day!' and 'Was it something to do with a hamster?' Heh heh heh. And yes, you do get another chance to traumatise Weird Ed... he's now very attached to his Pony Express stamps.

OK that's enough about games. I think I may have gone on a little too long about them.

Now this is really cool: someone cared enough about me to send me this award. The whole thing is a colossal joke of course - these people will set up a phony website just to fool you. This one awarded me NetKid of the Month; others inform a person that they are on a blacklist of porn users, or something similar.

Do you like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? If you do, Vogon Heavy Industries would like to hear from you. They offer astroengineering services at a very competitive rate. If you want a small planet removed for the least possible sum of Altairan Dollars, I strongly recommend them. They are also currently promoting the Earth release of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - an entirely online system which any hiker anywhere on Earth can access with a laptop and mobile phone. It saves on shipping the actual micro sub meson chips and sub-ether receivers from Ursa Minor. Alternatively, you can contribute to a rival Earth edition at H2G2, if you happen not to like Vogons very much for some reason, and that includes most of us.