barely fatal

I think my plants are planning to take over the world.

Moon is an indy sci-fi movie with Sam Rockwell playing himself. In three roles. It’s going to be released in Germany and the UK next month, but it’s already available on disc.

2001 meets Solaris. Been winning a ton of awards. Has Kevin Spacey’s voice in it. Guy alone on the moon, until he’s not alone anymore.

Watch it, it’s brilliant.

Saturday I started Anno 1404 (aka Dawn Of Discovery) after six months of not touching it. If you know me, you know I like me a proper destruction simulator. If you know me well, you know that building big things out of small things is something I like spending even more time with. I’ve always wanted to finish that one open-ended game. However I started a new scenario map (of course, duh).

Anno has this nice feature, you get a reminder to take a break after every 2 hours of continuous game play. “Maybe it’s time to grab a coffee.” Not intrusively, just a kind reminder. After eight hours it says “Too bad we can’t hand out a medal for that”, and after ten … your wrist starts to hurt. I just can’t put it down, there is always one more thing to do. And these things get more and more complex as the game progresses. It gets really hard to balance space constraints and resource availability. You ship stuff north and south and back, assemble things here and there and then deliver them to your city and you ever-demanding citizens so they advance to noblemen some day. Then you run out of stones. Or hemp. Or coal. Or all of those.

For a completionist like me, or a borderline OCD person this game is both a curse and a fulfilment of all dreams. Then and again I just like to watch. There are so many details.

Check the next screenshot, nothing spectacular, but do you see the rainbow in the waterfall?

You only see these little things if you zoom in really close – and you hardly ever do that. By the way, these shots are made in “post card” mode, you don’t get the blur in the normal view.

I can watch cows farms all day, or a public, err, execution punishment in the market place … The orient also ain’t bad. Makes for a good desktop background.

20 hours later I’m working on building the very last resource chain. Now I gotta start beautifying my metropolis. No more check board  layouts for top efficiency.

So we spent a day in Essen/Oberhausen/Duisburg.