Daily Report: High Def Day At Home

I had a long day of work today... but fruitful. I need more of those.

I broke out my "Civilization: Revolution" game today and was disappointed. I've played three previous iterations of the "Civilization" series on my PC, and this new version that was developed for the Playstation 3 is a very, very, thinned-down version in all aspects. Civilization is a game in which you build a civilization from the Stone Age all the way up to space exploration. The first thing that made the original game so fantastic was the incredibly detailed and in-depth way you could manage your civilization's growth. The second aspect was the immensity of the world in which your civilization was placed. Both of those things are gone: You are left almost no ability to micromanage your culture's progress, and the world in the Playstation 3 version is literally one-percent (or less) the size of the original. Sigh. I enjoyed building up nations with a hundred or more cities. Now, after 3 or 4 cities, you are bumping up against other cultures. Firaxis, the game maker, completely lost the point and plot of what made their game special.

Epril played her game, "Resistance, Fall Of Man" for a while as well. She refuses to read the instructions, and dove right in. However, the game has more controller buttons to push than your average tractor trailer. Epril became disillusioned and gave up after a couple of hours... but still hasn't read the instructions. I'm sure she'll try again.

During lunch, we watched the animated movie "Cars" on Blue Ray. I had put off buying an animated movie on high-def, thinking that there would not be enough image detail on the screen to make having a high definition copy worthwhile. Boy was I wrong. The difference was astounding, and Cars is easily the most visually stunning high-def movie I've seen so far.