A few things:

Since PSN is saying that the credit card data was encrypted, there's a change there's not going to be as huge a blowup as there might have been, but no one is saying anything definite (maybe they can't say anything definite, maybe they never will be able to and have to leave it up to users and credit card companies to find out). This doesn't reduce the seriousness the personal data being stolen in my mind, though. An article about what may be going on behind the scenes: 

http://www.cringely.com/2011/04/sony-may-be-clueless-in-psn-hack/

I just bought/ordered Alpha Centauri for rather cheap through One-Breasted-Archer, after a cool piece about AC on Rock Paper Shotgun drew my attention to the very cheap edition I eventually bought. I've meant to get AC for a while now once I realized what was going on with it, with its refreshing approach to factions and a hader-science, human approach to science fiction that's frigging rare. I guess there are heavy elements of Civ games in it, to the point where some people look at it as a re-skinned Civ game, but since I've never played a Civ game the similarities, whatever they are, don't really bug me in the least. Looking forward to it.

As you might know I'm interested in Skyrim's development, so I'm a bit weirded out by the pod people coverage we've been getting from Bethesda's junket in Utah. Each piece on each site that I've read so far has been fairly straightforward since everyone got to see the same thing, but what creeps me out isn't the general gist, these things happen when all the information is coming from one location, but how everyone mentions dragons as though their particular readers were clamoring for them. You can tell if the writer is interested in what he or she is talking about by the WAY the information comes out (some just sounded bored, some layered on the detail and made critical distinctions), but when they mention dragons the quotes feel eerily similar.  *brr.* The bare fact that dragons are in the game isn't that big a deal to me, but if they're well implemented and fun to fight and watch fly around, that of course is a good thing.

Since our Dynasty Warriors fervor has died down (all campaigns cleared, opening edit unlocked (which is hilarious to mess with), many endings unlocked), I've been playing a roguelike called Prospector, which has you running a small ship with a crew, where you fly through space to explore planets, do survey missions, blast space pirates, and all kinds of weird, random stuff. It's totally fun, and it's got a lot of the elements I've wanted in a game like this, helping me ease down the throttle on my own thwarted design ambitions and just enjoy someone else's designs for a change. It's still got a bit of the old roguelike stutters, like having a lot of keys for different things rather than a more user-friendly action tree, but the amount of enjoyment I get from a huge new surprise pretty much eliminates any annoyances. I DID have some issues for a while getting it to run, so make sure if you have trouble to contact the creator so he can help fix them.

Have a safe rest of the week!

Alpha Centauri is kind of great. It doesn't quite get over the hump of everything taking forever (which is basically my problem with every 4X game like this), and it's kinda still Civ II in space, but it's different enough to make it a more interesting game for me. Certainly more interesting than Civ III, I'll tell you that much.

And yeah, you can tell that Dragons must have been a giant bullet point for that presentation in Park City. I couldn't care a lick about random encounters with Dragons, I just want to see some sort of extended gameplay footage even if it is totally controlled and edited in such a way as to cut out the part where the game froze or the developer got stuck in a wall.

Ahhh, Alpha Centauri is one of about 5 PC games I look for every few months on the usual suspects of digital delivery. Having traded it away æons ago.
And every time, it rings in my head the old Usenet ROM-sharing mantra of "they abandoned it, I can't buy it new so why not just download it for free and they're not losing money either way." ...Then in the early 2000s commercialised emulation broke in a big way on disc, cart, and download, and everyone left standing in alt.binaries.emulators.* was just a bloody pirate.

In some respects one could almost believe license holders don't want to sell things. Logically it comes down to the cost of ensuring old software runs on new systems is prohibitively more than the expected profit from an 8+ year old game. Not every title put out on GOG.com is fully compatible with Windows 7, even. (Thankfully there are now user lists to help keep an eye on things.) But Sid Meier... Will Wright... men with their names in their game titles do not even have their entire catalogues available to purchase. What dark void between software and lawyers prevents both of us from getting Alpha Centauri as part of a $70 Firaxis Steam Bundle? I don't even play Civ, and I would buy a bag of that shit to pick out the red bubbly allsorts.

Glad you found a copy anyway! Play a round as Prokhor Zakharov for me. Meanwhile, the hunt for the other 4 continues.

"Glad you found a copy anyway! Play a round as Prokhor Zakharov for me. Meanwhile, the hunt for the other 4 continues. "

What ARE those other four, if you don't mind my asking?