Daily Nonsense

Help Van Mausing eradicate zombie mice.

With a tag line like ‘You’re hallucinating. Might as well enjoy it.’ it’s kinda’ hard to go wrong.

One of my favorite game franchises, SimCity, has added a module which takes into account the effects of carbon dioxide. Building a city and ignoring the issue will lead to elevated levels of greenhouse gasses and your carefully laid out cities will start to die off.

Players can take the path less chosen and build cities ’greener’, thus avoiding the hazards, but the only green choices you get in the game are BP Alternative energy options. Be that as it may, this may be a great primer for our politicians to use to get a grip on how ineffective legislation and poor planning have caused the problem and how this problem might be fixed with stricter legislation.

Although this seems more like a showcase for BP and their low-carbon technologies, this is the first game that I can recall that takes pollution in any form into account.

SimCity adds global warming to the mix
Posted by Cory Doctorow, October 11, 2007 2:40 AM

SimCity Societies — the forthcoming installment in the classic urban simulation franchise — will include a global warming variable. If your SimSocieties aren’t carefully balanced, they’ll swamp their environments with greenhouse gasses and die off. The module is produced with BP, who, I guess, are trying to figure out what a giant oil company does next.

The game does not force players to power their cities any specific way, but allows them to make choices, each of which come with advantages and disadvantages. Similar to real-life, the least expensive and most readily-available buildings in SimCity Societies are also the biggest producers of carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that contributes to global warming. Should players choose to build cities dependent on these types of sources for power to conserve their in-game money, their carbon ratings will rise and, at reaching critical levels, the game will issue alerts about the threat of the various natural disasters like droughts, heat waves and others that may strike their cities.

Alternatively, players can strive to create a greener environment and avoid hazards caused by excessive carbon emissions by choosing from a variety of BP Alternative Energy low-carbon power options. Using hydrogen and natural gas plants to wind farms and solar power, SimCity Societies encourages people to learn about some of the causes and consequences of global warming in an engaging, educational and meaningful way. While these power sources maintain nearby property values and keep the cities’ citizens safer from disaster, they also mimic real-life in that they cost players more of their funds, and do not produce as much power as less green options that take up similar space. Informative real-world snippets about power production and conservation will also be available in-game, informing players of global warming issues both virtually and in reality.

[Thanks, BoingBoing]

Yesterday, August 31, marked the 12th anniversary of the computer game Command & Conquer.

In celebration of the event, the original Command & Conquer Gold 2-CD game is being released for free through the GameSpy website. It is downloadable as two ISO files, one for the GDI disk and one for the Nod disk. You will need to burn the ISO files to CDs and follow some extra steps to get the game running on a WinXP computer, but I think it’s worth it if you don’t own the game and have never played it.

Command & Conquer Download Site

Command & Conquer Installation Instructions