Tag Archives: fantasy

Fantasian Kingdoms

Fantasian Kingdoms looks like a very interesting game, and they are one of the more interesting sponsors of my Buy Me a Lego campaign.

From the homepage:

Fantasia is a distant planet ruled by a mysterious race known as Fantasians. This planet is stuck in constant turmoil due to the magical force hidden deep within it’s core. This magic causes all Fantasians to be aggressive and violent in an attempt to feed the evil’s desire for souls. This is where you must take control of a small Province, and lead your people to victory over everyone else.

I’ve only played for a little bit, but I’ll try to give a decent description. It’s a multiplayer real-time strategy game that takes place over many, many hours. Just poking through the options, there are so many things to do. You’ve got military, buildings, wars, laws, research, mining, spies, diplomacy, markets, and more.

Here’s the cool thing, though: the game is completely on-line. No downloads of any type required. Best of all: it’s completely FREE. No monthly costs, no one-time costs.

Once completing the free registration, I was taken to a screen where I could control my province. Here’s where it is on the world map:dharvia It’s just a tiny little place amid a huge world. Once started, I got my scientists researching new building and military techniques, as well as exploration and building.

Fun stuff. Go check them out if you’re on the lookout for new, independent games.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Farewell, Robert Jordan

According to his blog, Robert Jordan passed away yesterday. He fought a tough illness for quite a while. I became a big fan of The Wheel of Time a few years ago and forced myself to stop reading the books until the final one comes out.

I loved the books because they were immense, detailed, complex, and very engaging. He was in the middle of writing it, and he has left notes and given an oral narration of the end of the series, but it just won’t be the same.

The Fountain

We just got Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain in the NetFlix mail today, and we loved it. Definitely worth watching, a thinking movie, a feast for the eyes. The use of lights was spectacular. It was in the same realm as What Dreams May Come (though I liked that one better), but it also made me think of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead. I’m afraid if I say why it will give too much of the movie away. It just needs to be seen and experienced.

See it–a wonderful movie.

What would the human race look like?

On my drive into work this morning, I heard an interesting story on on WAMU (sorry, can’t find the specific story link) about a Korean-American adopted by white American parents. While initially struggling against her Korean heritage, she eventually came to appreciate and be proud of it. The commentator, himself an adopted Korean in the same situation, was very grateful for the chance to grow up in such a mixed household.

Along with these thoughts, I there’s a set of novels I recently finished: Orson Scott Card’s Shadow series. In it, he describes an Earth that starts out a lot like the one we know today (maybe a few hundred years in the future), and is eventually unified under a single ruler. The novels are very good, despite the fact that they leave quite a bit of details about how this would happen, given the nature of humanity. On the other hand, maybe it’s merely evoking the philosophy that humans are inherently good, and given the right set of circumstances, they will choose to do good for all of us. I think I could believe that, despite what we see in the world today.

But these two stories together got me thinking: what if the entire world were open to us–no borders, easy  transportation, peaceful coexistence, interdependency, leading to high intermixing, intermarriage, etc…. What would we end up looking like as a human race? I initially thought of this question in terms of physical features, but it’s interesting to think about language, culture, economics, technology–anything at all. It certainly requires a great deal of imagination and taking things for granted to see this world, but I think it’s interesting in a futuristic, sci-fi sort of way.