Spore: The Best Game Ever

Ever since Ashley and I jumped the gun on Christmas, I have been compulsively playing Spore. Typicality, I don’t play many video game. When I do play, I rarely finish. Spore isn’t your typical role playing game, instead of leveling up your warrior with nerdy new features, in Spore, your creature evolves. You start by controlling a cell, evolving into a creature. That creature teams up with other creatures and makes a tribe. That tribe becomes powerful and turns into a civilization. Once your civilization is supreme, you move on to conquer outer space.

The game is very fun. Entertainment value aside, the game does a great job providing an accessible vantage point at how life really works. It’s exaggerated of course, but it offers a fun explanation of the theory of evolution. Once in the civilization stage, religion does make an appearance, however it’s only portrayed as another form of technology, on par with military technology.

It’s an extremely ambitious undertaking, to offer an entertaining and playable version of evolution all the way from cell, to galactic adventurer. The game doesn’t take too long to beat. I’ve been playing for just a few days and I’m already at the space stage. A few days play might be too short for many people, but I don’t have time to dedicate to really long term games.

Anti-Spore is as you would expect, anti-it. This mom is afraid of the damage of allowing children play an evolution game. In one entry she talks about how the game actually proves creation in how the player “creates” their creature, but still, it’s too dangerous to dabble in.

Last night, Ashley and I took a trip tp the the Yaglenski Family Holiday Light Show. It’s a free Christmas light show that the family puts on every year. You pull up and every 20 minutes the computer controlled light display puts on a show to a privately controlled radio frequency. It’s cool.

The Singularity is Near Movie

The Sony PS3 processes at 205 gflops (205 billion calculations per second).

The new Jaguar supercomputer performs 1 pedaflop (1 quadrillion calculations per second).

Scientists predict that humans operate at 100 pedaflops (100 quadrillion calculations per second). The singularity is on it’s way.

Speaking of which, Ray Kurzewil‘s favorite topic (the Singularity) is being made into a movie and is coming out next year The Singularity is Near movie.