Aliens on the Horizon

Last night I finished up playing James Bond 007: Nightfire for Xbox. It was a pretty fun game, but I don't think it was quite as good as Agent Under Fire. Agent Under Fire had a lot of neat missions that weren't first person shooter themed. There were rail shooting levels and some sweet driving levels. In Nightfire, there are still a couple of driving missions and one rail shooter mission, but I wanted more of them, not less.

The first person shooter levels were fun and a few had nice, big environments that made it much more immersive but, dammit, I wanted more driving levels! Oh, the other thing that annoyed me about Nightfire was the crappy plot. There really isn't much of one. There's this guy, he's doing something with nuclear missiles, you have to stop him, people that work for him want to kill you, there's some space station that has to do with this as well....... yeah, none of it really gelled together very well. It was also dumb that the virtual Bond made out with almost EVERY SINGLE female character in the game. He was just the epitome of a man-slut in this game. Other than those few things, though, this was an enjoyable game.

The next game on my "to play" list is Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I've played the first few missions and it's a fun game, but one thing is really pissing me off--the cinematics are very jerky and laggy. I don't get it, this game was ported over from PS2 and the Xbox is way more powerful so there shouldn't be any jerky cinematics. It should have also been caught in the game's QA cycle and been fixed but apparently no one cared to do that. Maybe it'll go away the further I get into the game. If it doesn't, I might just skip all the plot crap and just stick to blowing crap up.

While reading my morning dosage of news, I stumbled across this. I always wondered if SETI@HOME was actually accomplishing anything while I ran it, and apparently it is for some people. Out of the thousands of SETI units my computer analyzed it only found a few signals that would even warrant a second look. Now, it appears that they've found some interesting and unique signals.

I love the thought that there might be intelligent life out there somewhere, and I hope that this pans out to actually be something interesting and scientifically explorable. Who knows, maybe this is another type of celestial body they've found, much like the pulsar so many years ago. I'd really be interested to know more about the different types of signals that scientists look for and what they usually find, so if you know of somewhere good to look, let me know.