The February 2010 issue of PC Gamer lists the Top 10 games of 2010. And guess which game made the list? That’s right’s Starcraft II.
But there’s one other strategy game on there – a turn based strategy game at that: ELEMENTAL along with an exclusive screenshot.
Here’s a little teaser (not the same shot but similar):
One of my observations on the net is that the better known I become, the more likely someone will flame me and try to explain how much more they know than I do in one of my professional areas of expertise.
Whether this be the game industry, business, or PC software development, I increasingly will find some guy on a forum who will smugly try to tell me how much smarter than they are than I am.
Now, maybe they are smarter than I am. But strangely, what I suspect is more likely is that they think that if they can knock me down a peg that this somehow raises them up.
Ah, vacation is over. So much to do. The next public beta is scheduled for Thursday, February 4th. That build should have the dynasties and quests in it. Don’t worry, it will NOT be fun yet, I promise. I try to suck out all the fun in the betas. I need to. Below is a picture of me at work that might help:
2009 sucked. There. I said it. Deaths. Stress. It was just a bad year.
And I gained weight. My ideal weight is 165lbs. I’m now 180lbs.
My goal is to get to 170lbs in 10 weeks.
Each Monday I’ll weigh myself to see how I’m doing and update this post to display my shame (or progress).
Since it’s a pretty modest diet, here’s the basic plan:
Pretty mild stuff. But 10,000 steps should burn about 2500 more calories a week and the soda another 500 calories. That should be enough to lose that pound a week – especially when my non-binging weight is around 176. It should be pretty easy to get to 175lbs. It’ll be the last 5 pounds that get a little tougher.
Once to 170lbs, I’ll see where to next. 
So what’s on the agenda for 2010 at Stardock? Anything cool? Of course! That’s what we do!
Let’s walk through some of the items on our list…
Wincustomize 2010
In March, WinCustomize 2010 will launch. It will go into beta this month.
The new site is a total rewrite and represents a great deal of development labor to clean things up to be faster and present information a lot more easily.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy
If you like Sins of a Solar Empire, you’re going to love the Diplomacy expansion pack. Not just because it adds two new AI levels, not just because it adds a new multiplayer speed option, not just because of the new ships. No. The reason it’s turning out so well (besides the open beta where we’re getting lots of good ideas) is because it makes the game feel truly rounded out.
Given able to give the pirates or other factions missions or send over envoys to get more money and resources and have other means to win the game rather than simply blowing everything up as fast as possible has really helped the game feel more well rounded.
Of course, I can’t just go without a little live battle. With diplomacy, this scene belies my Palpatine like strategy of making the AI do my bidding.
Elemental
Another big thing for this year will be Elemental which we expect to release this Summer or Fall if all goes on schedule (which we make no promises on because Elemental is “our baby” and it won’t go out until it’s awesome).
The above screenshot is not really representative of what the final version will look like. The final version will look vastly better than this. But for anyone who has ever wondered what an epic turn-based strategy game and an role playing game put together might be like, Elemental is what we’re going for. It’s our most ambitious game ever and has the longest beta program we’ve ever done in order to ensure we nail it down.
WindowBlinds 7.x
If you haven’t checked out WindowBlinds 7, you will definitely want to look at it. Even if you’re not into “skinning” the subtle improvements it can do to the Windows GUI can be quite nice.
WindowFX
Sorry, no screenshots yet but this is going to be a major effort this year too. There’s a lot of new improvements to Windows 7, Vista, and XP we will be making this year. Users of Object Desktop get all our desktop goodies first. And this year, there’s going to be a lot.
DeskScapes 3.x
At the very end of last year, our animated wallpaper program, DeskScapes, got a major new version. Last year was to get the foundation set. This year, we can go to town with this technology.
What’s magic about DeskScapes is that on Windows 7/Vista it uses the DWM to deliver animated wallpaper. So what does that mean? It means the cool stuff happens on your video card rather than your CPU. The only time your CPU gets touched is if you’re running a video as your animated background (and even then, it’s just the decoding of the .WMV or MPEG or whatever).
For this year, a lot of new effects and features are being added so that even your existing “static” wallpapers can get cool effects done to them – either kept static with effects or animated.
Impulse: Phase 5
It’s hard to believe that Impulse is barely over a year old. In the past year, Impulse has gone from being a fairly primitive download utility with only Stardock software on it and a handful of indies to a full-blown digital distribution platform with titles available from Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubi Soft, THQ, and so on.
Impulse: Phase 5 might as well be called the “community release” of Impulse. Because Phase 5 will be a nearly complete revamp of the platform to greatly expand its community features. Moreover, a lot of work has been done behind the scenes to open up Impulse to third party developers to integrate community features into their applications and games as well as streamline their publishing and distribution onto the net.
General Theme
The big theme for this year is probably “Community integration”. We will show screenshots of some of this stuff as we get closer.
That’s not all
Of course, this year we’ll still have plenty of updates to lots of other things from Demigod to DesktopX to new Object Desktop programs and so on. Plus we have some unannounced projects that we hope to finally be able to make public this year.
It’s going to be an exciting year and we can’t wait to spend it with you guys (and gals!).
If you work with people online, I’ve not found anything that touches the recent versions of Skype.
Skype has gotten so good that I almost feel like they should change its name because a lot of people have come to remember Skype as being that thing for doing crappy video and audio calling.
Over the past year it has become, imo, the best chat program (text, voice, video, whatever) out there.
I live near Detroit. This is where good intentions leads to.
Obinna
January 2nd, 2010 8:49 am ET
Wishing him good health under my belove president obama health care reform.
Mary
January 2nd, 2010 8:49 am ET
Its the hate inside you rush that's eating your insides like a cancer. This should be a wakeup call to you.
tracy
January 2nd, 2010 8:43 am ET
Rush?...a heart?...who woulda thought.
Kate in ATL
January 2nd, 2010 7:39 am ET
I know what's wrong with his heart. It's made of stone.
kate
January 2nd, 2010 5:56 am ET
I guess it was just a lot of hot gas.
Check again
January 1st, 2010 11:08 pm ET
I think you might find that it is very selfish, greedy, & full of hatred. Nothing wrong? I don't think so.
ShiWms n Phx AZ
January 1st, 2010 10:45 pm ET
All that fat around his heart. Hes lying.
Delores
January 1st, 2010 10:42 pm ET
Who cares i cant stand that man
Nimises
January 1st, 2010 9:55 pm ET
There's nothing wrong for you, its the best 400 million could buy. Perhaps the pain in your heart was the last piece of moral ethics dying since you've sold your soul.
Ah such compassion on the left..
Full story here http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/01/tests-reveal-nothing-wrong-with-limbaughs-heart/
10…
9…
As I write this, it’s 8:30pm on New Year’s Eve.
Maybe it’s the 20 margaritas.
Maybe it’s the head trauma from Dick Cheney.
Or maybe, just maybe it’s just a good old fashioned epiphany but the fact is, the Stardock community rocks. Such a statement has to be quantified here lest it be a generic markety-sounding thingy. Let me outline what makes users in our community special.
Number 10: If I say “Stay awhile…stay forever!” Our community will have the highest concentration of people who know where that comes from.
Number 9: When Stardock screws up or doesn’t do something as well as others, our users don’t just complain but instead make posts with suggests and ideas on how to do better. They’re not just “customers”, they’re part of the solution. Example: Impulse Christmas sales weren’t as good as the ones on Steam or Drive2Drive. Everyone upped their game. Impulse didn’t up it as much as it should have. Did users just complain? Nope. They gave ideas on how we can do it better next time.
Number 8: Users help users. When Demigod shipped the multiplayer servers completely fell apart when a significant number of people were online trying to use it. Rather than there being some huge user firestorm, instead, users stepped up, volunteered their precious free time to help us and allowed us to develop a completely new system from scratch in less than 3 weeks including a world-wide client/server proxy network. 3 weeks. No way that could have been done without active user help.
Number 7: Less toxic-users. Multiplayer gaming can be pretty rough. And while there are certainly griefers in Demigod and Sins of a Solar Empire, compared to what people run into typically online, the communities are incredibly helpful. My 13 year old son got online to play Demigod and joined a “newbie game” that was run by a seasoned member of the community who showed the newbies the ropes on how to play.
Number 6: Civility on the forums. As people know, Stardock’s various communities are linked together. You might be reading this post on Impulse, WinCustomize, JoeUser, Demigod, Sins, GalCiv, or some other site. As some know, we barely moderate the forums. And yet the forums are pretty tame, polite, and full of helpful people.
Number 5: Design by users. Anyone who has been part of a Stardock beta knows this but we put out our betas when they are “alphas” (and that’s being generous with the term). Our users help design our programs. Whether it be Elemental or WindowBlinds few communities have had such influence over the course of the industry as these people.
Number 4: Political Nirvana. While outside our community I’ve been called everything from a “Neo-con” to a “#$#% tree hugger” you guys in our community know that we’re all everywhere. Let’s face it, only a privately held company could literally support discussions in their public forums that range from Global Warming to Evolution to whether Laura Croft is hotter than…oh, nevermind, no one is hotter.
Number 3: Statistical odds of someone in our community liking Simpsons, Family Guy, and/or Monty Python are approximately 100%. (these questions are asked as part of our job interview process – unless you work for the government in which case of course we don’t ask those questions…)
Number 2: You’re a PC user. You make no bones about it. You don’t like your games dumbed down. You don’t buy into “piracy” as being the end all answer as to why the latest console port that requires an 12-core I9 with 4 nVidia cards to play didn’t sell as well as it should have.
Number 1: Excellence is a reason unto itself. You like or community because we’re inclusive. If I buy games off of Steam or list Left4Dead as one of my favorite games or post news items for Disciples or Space Empires IV or what have you, you guys understand why I did this. Supporting excellence in all its forms doesn’t mean artificially limiting ones choices. We don’t take sides even if it means we literally host our competitors software on our own servers to ensure the world sees it.
Happy New Year everyone! 2010 is going to be awesome. I PROMISE!