And luckily real life was never like the farming in Settlers. No little guys wandering over from the next county, wearing brightly-coloured cloaks and carrying swords.

Sometimes that might have been preferable.

Just today I saw something astonishing: a game concluded not just with the usual four cures, but four eradications. I wouldn't have thought it possible.

And he thought that this was fun.

The EMT Simulator, for example. I had fun setting people on fire, but I'm complete crap at actually saving people (my skills being limited to "YOU! Call 911!" and untested CPR training).

Which of course suggests another post... how not to tick off SAR teams who have to go look for you.

It also sounds to me like a game that actively rewards replay -- there's a \lot/ of room for learning if you don't already know the systems that the real world has worked out -- which is something the reviewer misses. cf Connie@11's comment that this could have grown out of a training tool; the computer games I've seen tend not to tell you where you goofed, and training tools often have a human for that purpose (as in T's Bus Trainees Can Now Fake the Wheel)

The installation goes through smoothly, however, I have not yet been able to actually, y'know, _launch_ the game.

Your best bet for the Mac probably is to get a parallel windows installation (works for the Intel Macs at least), but I don't know whether that will actually work.

Jim: Read your review. Bought the game based on it, and without double checking that I could play it here. THAT's how impressed I was. :-)

Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called "Journey to Alpha Centauri". It was a screen with some dots on it. Because, he said, it happened in real time, which no-one had ever heard of until computers. He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, "Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home."

-- Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind

But yeah, nice quiet little mall.

Arthur Ganson had a work of art at the MIT museum where there was a train of gears that had an effective gear ratio of several billion to one. The first gear was spinning freely. The last gear was embedded in concrete.

I'd really like them to open a store or two in Maine. Three plus hours is a bit far to go for groceries.

(Note to Fluorospherians visiting the Boston area: the MIT Museum also has an exhibit of Doc Edgerton's strobe photographs and equipment, and a short ride away on the MBTA #1 bus is the Mapparium at the Christian Science Mother Church.)

Then I was indirectly involved with an exercise the FDA recently held. That agency, as far as I'm aware, doesn't do ICS training, and I was astonished by how many of their issues could have been solved with basic ICS/HSEEP training.

NIFC has shuffled their links around - the current link to the IFC docs (aka the Red Book) are buried under Policies / "Interagency Standards for Fire & Aviation Operations 2009" which is certainly obvious to anyone new to NIFC. Um. Yeah.

Then again, I spend a lot of time on the NRC's website chasing down NUREGs so from one .gov website to another the search wasn't too bad, comparatively. :)

Somehow that led me to FEMA (I think it was your original post on ICS) and I found the gem of FEMA's correspondence courses on emergency management. As Austin Powers would quip, "my bag" is nuclear safety and radiological analysis, so I'm always interested in how different agencies & organizations write up their radiological & industrial safety training. I have to say that FEMA did a damned good job with IS-3 "Radiological Emergency Management." Though I have to wonder if it's been gathering dust since the Clinton Administration last took emergency management seriously or it's the work of a Bush Administration hire who took the old-school Civil Defense stuff to heart or it's the work of a shiny new Obama Administration hire who understands reality and good management and good government. Regardless, whoever put it together made it refreshingly lucid, accurate, and straightforward.

But most of all, thanks for a new bargain videogame to occupy my copious free time. I'm far past my prime 'twitch' game years, we gave away our TV and stereo when we moved north in November and haven't found the time to get a replacement (upshot: no PS/2), and I still maintain an unnatural fondness for Jack Webb's original "Emergency!" from back in the early 70s when paramedics were a new concept. Hopefully the game will help me build delegation skills ("You there, do something useful!" <click> <click>) Monty Burns meets the Wizard of Oz meets Dr. Brackett.

Not that I have a lot of free time for videogames, but between FEMA, ICS, and little poor little electronic Germans being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I should have my hands full for the next month or so. Thanks!

We did manage it with only 4 epidemic cards in the deck, playing a scientist and a medic. It was more common to run out of player cards in the deck before we could finish. Now that we figured out that you just need four cures, it is much easier to win.

On the whole, though, I really like the game -- the gameplay works with the theme to produce a great sense of impending doom and the sense that the closest you'll get to victory is a temporary breather. (please, just one quiet night...)

I said up above that all but one of the missions was introduced by a brief movie segment (sniper in town/bank robbery/hostage situation). Well, looking around on YouTube, I found that there is a movie segment that introduces it -- only it's not on my disk.

The question is, do I have a buggy disk, or is that one not included because of something in the ESRB guidelines that would have given the game a more restrictive rating than "Teen" if it had been included?

Sebastian@29: In a multi-player game I would go so far as to say that the Dispatcher is the most powerful role.

Cohen the Barbarian probably gets up in the morning and thinks 'Oh, no, not another day of crushing the jewelled thrones of the world beneath my sandalled feet'.

So true, -sigh-. At least every once in awhile you get to subdue a mad wizard bent on either world domination or world destruction.

One commenter on the youtube link also states that they never get this scene, which makes an intentional removal seem even more likely. (Unless, of course, you are paranormalpunk379.)

A.B. Chandler did a John Grimes novel around the notion of "people who live on the Rim would go to hell for a vacation", as I recall.

It does sound like quite an interesting game, and probably sunk because revewiers would rather the game adapt to them (differing, I suppose, only in storyline, concept, and such things; all games in any given genre must have the same interface and gameplay, no?) than adapt themselves to the game, which hurts many otherwise fine, even excellent or superb games.

Enjoying the game well now: Thanks! for the recommendation.