sci-fi
Culture
Phasers Set To Fun
3:00AM Brian Crecente | Life in the 24th and 25th century wasn’t all about shooting people with phasers, knocking around aliens and “making it so”. More »
News
Nintendo Asks You To Get LOST On Wuhu Island
8:00AM Brian Crecente | You know, pop-culture referencing television show Lost isn’t the only form of entertainment that includes island fun. More »
Features
Six PADDs I Would Actually Buy
3:00AM Brian Crecente | I may be tempted to one day buy the iPad as a crossover ereader, but there’s nothing magical about the device for me. Not unless you replace one of its vowels with a consonant. More »
News
There’s Another Battlestar Galactica Game In The Works
6:40AM Michael McWhertor | The Sci Fi Channel’s re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series may have ended its five-year-long run, giving its fans even less to do on Friday nights, but the property may still live on in video game form. More »
Media
Get Your Battlestar Galactica Fix With These Games
6:00PM Luke Plunkett | After a run of over five years, Battlestar Galactica finished over the weekend, and there’s a hole in my heart. Probably one in yours, too. One that needs filling. More »
Sci Fi Channel Readies GameQuest
4:30AM Mike Fahey | The Sci Fi Channel has given producers Granada America and World Cyber Games the green light to produce a new competitive gaming television series, tentatively titled GameQuest. The 8 episode series will bring together 12 gamers, who will compete in a variety of elimination events including both video games and game-themed physical challenges for the title of “best all-around gamer”, with a prize of $100,000 and trips to World Cyber Games events up for grabs. “With two out of every three American households playing video games, it’s clear that this mainstream phenomenon is a perfect arena for the channel’s agenda of broadening the brand while celebrating imagination,” Sci Fi channel president Dave Howe said. More »
News
Terminator Owners To Release Philip K Dick Games
1:40PM Luke Plunkett | You sitting down, sci-fi nerds? Halcyon – who now own the rights to the whole Terminator franchise – have secured the option to develop a number of films and games based on the works of Philip K Dick. At this stage, two games are planned. There’s no word on just which of Dick’s 44 novels and 120 short stories yet to be adapted (obviously people already own the rights to Total Recall, Minority Report, etc) will be picked up, so fans can go right ahead and start pencilling in their own personal top-fives while we wait for a fleshier announcement. He’ll be back, several times – possibly [The Guardian] More »
X3 Expansion In The Works
10:30AM Logan Booker | Egosoft has quietly announced X3: Terran Conflict, a standalone expansion for its mega-confusing by extremely rewarding space trading sim X3.
The news arrived via a post on Egosoft’s official forums. Here’s a snippet:
X³: Terran Conflict is a brand new, stand-alone game set in the universe of X³. It is the culmination of the X trilogy, with a grand finale that takes us all the way back to Earth’s own solar system. Gamers can take on the roles of different characters in the X universe, or of a Terran military pilot, and experience a multitude of stories in the largest X universe ever featured – for X³: Terran Conflict will offer more missions than any other X game before.
Meanwhile, X³: Terran Conflict will pose questions such as: How has Earth changed in all these years? And how will relations between Earth and its counterparts in the X universe develop?
Egosoft has a page up on its site for the expansion, but it’s a little barren. From the sounds of things it may simply be a new campaign with a few gameplay tweaks. Though I’m hoping it’s not, because I adore X3. Yes, it had a learning curve steeper than Mt. Everest, but once you mounted that summit, the view was glorious. Erectile even.
What I’d like to see? An expansion that combines all the useful mods the community has created over the years into one, beautiful, sanctioned product.
NEWS: X³: Terran Conflict announced [Egosoft, via Blue's News] More » 
EVE Online Trinity Patch Corrupts Windows XP
10:40PM Logan Booker | Trinity, the latest content update for the sci-fi MMO EVE Online, is overwriting an important boot file required by Windows XP. As you can guess, the bug prevents affected systems from starting. Not only is this stopping people from playing the game, it’s making it rather hard for them to do much with their PCs at all.
There are three ways to update to Trinity – using a classic patch, classic to premium and full premium. It’s the second of these that’s causing the problem. The update comes with a file called “boot.ini”, which just so happens to be the exact same name for a critical file of Windows XP’s bootstrap. For some reason, the update overwrites this file, even though it resides in a completely different directory.
EVE Online developer CCP has confirmed that the bug exists and has posted various solutions on the game’s official forums. It’s my understanding that CCP is working on a fix.
Only Windows XP machines are affected, so Vista users and users of older versions of Microsoft’s operating system can sleep easy.
Boot.ini problems [EVE Online forums, via Atomic] More » 
