Enjoying Star Control 3

I know this game gets a lot of beef, especially from fans of Star Control 1 and 2. There's no denying that Accolade mistreated Toys for Bob which is a shame. I'd like to see what these guys would have come up with as a sequel.

Maybe we'll see a new Star Control in spirit if not in name yet.

Star Control 3 may not be considered canon by the hardcore fans. It may have problems, such as from sitting around in the same spot waiting for fuel, weak AI on enemy ships, and the Syreen losing all sex appeal, but I'm having a hard time not playing it.

After playing little else outside of social games, I no longer have to worry about waiting an hour or two to regain my energy so I can go back to the game to click on a few more things. Instead I struggle with quitting the game, as I tell myself I'll only go to one last planet before I go to sleep.

I enjoy the story, the voice acting (set my phone notification to "We are the Mycon, we respond,") the funky puppets, and the wining the fights when the computer provides more challenge than just trying to stay as far as possible.

I wonder to myself if I'll ever be able to spin quite a delightful yarn, while thinking of the different directions I could take.
I think when I finish the game, I'll start playing Shadow of the Colossus, which I never got around to, before I check out the Ur-Quan Masters and what the fans have done with the source code.

Entertaining myself at the grandparent's place

As a child my parents would sometime, such as on long holiday breaks, leave my brother and I at the care of our grandparents, with both sets living fairly close to each other, but an hour and a half drive from home.

Neither my maternal or paternal grandparents had computers, so other ways of entertaining myself had to be found.
TV was one such way, but until the mid-90's we only had 2 stations to choose from, which didn't always have child appropriate shows.
A VCR was available, and walking down to the video rental store and picking something out was as much fun as watching what we chose, it seems we have seen all the classic Looney Tunes and Disney cartoons that way.
My maternal grandparents also had some video tapes passed down from the American branch of our extended family, degraded copies of such classics as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or Alice in Wonderland.
Grandma had some girl magazines from when she was a girl (dad's mom is a holocaust survivor who didn't have much left from her childhood, but she survived them all.) which didn't quite suit my taste, but beggars can't be choosers and they were marginally better than grandpa's gardening magazines - there are only so many ads for sprinkler systems I can look at.

Another hit from that time was going to the supermarket to buy freeze pops and something banned from the US and no longer imported to Israel - Kinder eggs. These things had amazing toys inside (unless you had the bad luck of getting a statue) which were a joy to assemble, and fun to play with for about ten minutes.

When I discovered arcades I found there was one in a nearby shopping center, and would spend countless hours in there, even just to watch demo modes going on. Later I found a few others to haunt, longer to walk too and full of cigarette smoke, but with new games to look at.
I even started getting money to play, even though I hadn't asked for any, probably because my brother got bored just tagging along.

In closing, I think these experiences had a lot of impact on my creativity these days, even if it isn't always obvious exactly how.

Space ship design language

Above is an image from Master of Orion 2, showing one color option for the ships which you can choose.
I am currently working on some of my own ships designs, following the long standing tradition of designing such vehicles with a unified design language.
The benefits of using such a system are as clear as figuring out who is friend or foe.

Thing is, when you look at current and past transportation technology things don't quite work out that way.

Fighter jets look quite different from commercial airliners. Different colors and camouflage patterns are used for the same aircraft even when used by the same people.
I think extraterrestrial intelligence may end up working along similar lines: form will fit function, yet we won't mistake it for anything we've built here on earth, just as they won't mistake our vehicles for their own.

I'll continue to design my ships for the human player, but this is food for thought. Maybe I'll stumble onto something.