Leaderboard

Hello all, I moved the website that I previously had at duneii.com to a more long-term subdomain... duneii.nahoo.net plus I redesigned (the old one was a mega-table design) and added a lot more content too. I did try the dune2k.com contact form but it sent me to a blank white page on submission... so have a look at that. If you want your Dune II website listed there, please send me a reply here or through the website. I want to have something there for the long term that can be used by the community.

Nice, I let him now.

I changed his account to a regular one so he should be able to log in again, can you let him know? The authenticator was a requirement for moderators and I thought it was skippable if you weren't using moderator functions but I might have been wrong.

Showing my age but are there any 80s/90s Starflight fans here? Growing up with Star Trek I dreamed of a game where I could command a starship exploring a huge galaxy encountering aliens and landing on strange worlds. Starflight was the first ever game that granted that wish (before all the good Trek games finally came along) as it had hundreds of different planets to explore and lots of strange aliens to either battle or trade with in space. Naturally I’d call my ship the ISS Enterprise and give all my customized crew members Trek names Eg the Captain would be Kirk, Science Spock, Engineer Scotty, Communication Uhura, Navigator Sulu and Doctor McCoy. Unfortunately I’d run out of positions after that, sorry Chekov haha! Although in the early game when it was too expensive to train up your crew you could use reasonably skilled androids in the roles so naturally they got called Data lol. I grew up playing the 90s SF1 remake on Sega MegaDrive/Genesis (pic below) and eventually got my hands on SF2 for Amiga... most people probably know the 80s PC & Amiga versions more. After SF2 the series had been dead for like 30yrs yet amazingly in 2018 Greg Johnson tried to crowdfund a new Starflight 3 sequel. Greg was the creator and lead developer of the original Starflight games, and he also created the popular ToeJam & Earl console games too. But sadly the SF3 crowdfund attempt failed miserably as the fan community was in a bad near dead state and almost none of the mainstream gaming media sites covered it so one knew about it! Well 3 years on there unfortunately hasn't been another attempt at a Starflight 3 game crowdfund or a new demo. However recently the first ever Starflight Anthology book was released and to celebrate that occasion something really cool happened! I run the Starflight fan communities so as a 'thanks' I got invited to take part in a group video podcast interviewing non other than Starflight lead dev and creator Greg Johnson himself! I was a nervous wreck as I don't normally do live stuff, and I think I was the only non-American on there so people were probably wondering what I was saying half the time lol, plus on top of that my giant 46" screen was glaring on my face making me look like a bloody ghost haha.. but in the end I had a blast as it was so cool to talk to one of the creators of a game I played so much as a kid, not to mention getting thanked by him for my Starflight community work! Greg was a super nice and humble guy and he told so many great stories about creating Starflight, and his very popular ToeJam & Earl console games, along with his consultation work on the Star Control games and Spore which many of us didn't know about! He even discussed the possibility of a Starflight and Star Control crossover game which would be pretty crazy! And sure enough he confirmed that the original Starflight games were heavily influenced by Star Trek heh. He also confirmed that the dream of Starflight 3 is not dead and that just a week ago he was on the phone with someone trying to secure funding for it. He talked about his dreams of what the sequel could be and he showed openness to trying another crowdfund campaign. We did our best to assure him that the Starflight fan community is in a WAY better state then it was back in 2018 when they last tried the crowdfund as back then all the big old Starflight forums were gone and there was only around 100 people in my 'new' Starflight Fans Facebook group so there was just no one to friggin tell about it! That's up around 400ish members now, plus I've since created a Starflight Fans Reddit group which is closing on 100 now, and best of all there's the Official Starflight 3 Discord I help out on as a moderator which is now up to a massive 800ish members, so that's over a 1000 starflight fans that weren't around in 2018 so we're getting there! The games sold millions of copies back in the day so there's certainly still plenty of long lost Starflight fans out there though! If there's any Starflight old timers lurking around here I hope you come join the gang! Anyway, here's the video podcast if anyone is interested if anyone is interested. I posted a comment on youtube with timestamps of interesting topics should people wish to skip to stuff that interests them... There was more I wanted to say on there but yeah.. obviously the podcast wasn't about me haha.. but I got to say most of what I wanted. Really the only big thing I didn't get to say on the podcast was that I'm excited to read the new Starflight - Tales From The Starport Lounge anthology book (I've ordered it from Amazon but it hasn't arrived yet as it's probably on a slow ship heading for Australia lol!). I'm not a huge book person but I just had to get this as like I said earlier in the stream video it's amazing how playing a game and reading a book about an adventure set in that same game universe really enhances the experience. The game makes you love the book more and helps your imagination visualize the aliens and places they'll go to in the book. While vice versa the book makes you love the game more as it adds so much depth to the game universe and makes you crave going on your own adventures similar to the ones these new characters your reading about are going on. They both really buff and lift up each other to a whole new level forming this equilibrium of awesomeness haha! I had that experience with the Starflight manual short stories as a kid, and I had it in the years since with other games like Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Witcher, and the X Universe series space games that all have novels or short stories set in the same universe. So hopefully I'll like the new book and get to have that experience again with Starflight! Once thing's for sure, I already know I like the cover haha!

So, according to my profile, I registered here on the Fed2k forums on 17 April 2000. This means that today marks my 20th forum birthday. And what better way to celebrate 20 years than to post a new thread on my favourite board? PRP needs some new life breathed into it. Back in November-December 2009, @Wolf posted a thread called The Next Decade and @Dunenewt posted one called The Last Decade, which were about looking back on the political events of the 2000s and speculating about what the 2010s might be like. In that spirit, let's look back on the 2010s now, and speculate about the twenties (finally, we will have clear, uncontroversial decade names again!). I actually wanted to come back to Fed2k to post a thread like this back in December 2019. In retrospect, maybe it's a good thing I didn't, because almost everything I was going to say about the 20s just became obsolete in a matter of months, due to the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, even some of what I was going to say about the 10s is a little obsolete, because what happens in the present changes how we look at the past. What I was going to say, in December 2019, was something like this: The 2010s have been a decade of economic stagnation and increasing political tensions. The decade started in the shadow of the Great Recession, which seemed to be the harbinger of great change, with movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the West, the Arab Spring in the Arab world, and the election of Syriza in Greece. But nothing came of them. The Occupy movement fizzled out (largely due to its lack of any clear goals), Syriza capitulated to the neoliberal order of the EU, and the Arab Spring turned into a harsh winter of civil wars and Islamist insurgencies, with Libya descending into Somalia-like chaos and Syria having a decade-long civil war. None of the underlying problems of global economics or politics were resolved. The second half of the decade saw the rise of the far-right, especially in Europe and North America, but even this rise has been slow. I predicted the return of fascism to the political mainstream back in 2012, and this has been happening, but very slowly. Fascist and right-wing authoritarian ideas have been growing in popularity and acceptance continuously since 2012 (and especially since 2016), but so slowly that today they are still very much on the fringes of politics. They're important enough that mainstream right-wing politicians try to appeal to them from time to time, but no more than that. So here we are, at the end of 2019, with the world not being too different from how it was in 2009. Back in 2009, I said that "for the most part, it was a decade of business as usual" and that "there was no shift in the global balance of power". That still holds more or less true for the 2010s, although less so. A few major changes in the global balance of power did happen. Crimea was annexed by Russia. The UK left the EU. China's rise, although as gradual as ever, began to have a noticeable impact. Donald Trump's presidency has brought right-wing populism to the US (as well as staggering incompetence that endangers the American empire). But overall, things in 2019 are not fundamentally different from 2009. The United States is still the global hegemon with no close challenger (although China can be seen on the horizon). Neoliberal capitalism still reigns. Revolutionary movements (of any and all kinds) have made no progress. Climate change proceeds as before. But tensions are rising. Economic growth rates in the developed world the 2010s have been the lowest since World War II. Economic inequality is the highest it has been since 1929 (and still growing). The legitimacy of liberal democracy has been greatly eroded, and populist movements (mostly of the right-wing variety) are slowly chipping away at the fortress walls of the global liberal order, which don't look nearly as invulnerable as they did a decade ago. Politics is extremely polarized in every Western country, and seems to be only growing more polarized over time. There is growing anger and discontent all around. I think future historians will look back at the 2010s as a decade of growing tensions, leading up to... something. Something big is coming. I don't know what it will be, but I know a "factors leading up to" chapter in a history book when I'm living through it. This was a decade of storm clouds gathering. I don't know what storm is coming, but it's there, just beyond the horizon. * * * * * So that's what I was going to say back in December 2019. Since then, the storm has actually begun. I expected it more like around 2025, but it's already here, now. I expected a political or economic storm - maybe another 2008-style great recession, or a far-right government taking power somewhere and throwing the balance of power into chaos (perhaps Marine Le Pen becoming French president). But instead, the catalyst for the storm came from... nature. It was a pure exogenous shock, the likes of which we almost never see in the modern world. A deadly pandemic swept across the world and shut down the global economy. We were heading for some kind of big recession anyway, but Covid-19 just upgraded it from "big recession" to "Second Great Depression" status. The 2010s will not be seen as the gathering storm now, because the storm hit abruptly from a completely different direction. Now the 2010s will be seen as the Intercrisis Period. The decade between the Great Recession and the Second Great Depression. The 20s will be interesting times indeed. The world as we knew it is over, and anything is possible. Global supply chains are fracturing, and developed countries will be forced to bring back domestic industrial production. Globalization is - at least for now - over. Neoliberalism is also dead, permanently so. The only way out of the coming Depression will be with massive government intervention in the economy. The right as well as the left will have no choice but to return to state-driven economic policies. And there will be mass unemployment, poverty, and shortages of basic goods - the kind of conditions that give rise to revolutions. I thought we were gradually headed towards a breaking point some time in the mid-to-late 20s. But the breaking point is already here. The 20s will be a decade of great change. It's still too early to tell if the change will be good or bad, but it will be great. * * * * * And of course, this leads us to the most important question: Are we still going to have Fed2k around in 2029? Well, past evidence suggests that the answer is yes: It turns out that we did. Here's to another decade!

I'm a little late to the party with this even bigger news but OMG lol.. After 25 years of nothing it really is an amazing time for us diehard Master of Magic fans! There I was a few weeks ago getting excited about Seravy’s new Caster of Magic 2 for Windows release and then something even more amazing got officially announced, as we finally have confirmation of the Slitherine mystery MoM project I’ve posted about here before! Slitherine are working with Thea series creators MuHa games on a Official Master of Magic Remake!!! MuHa are a small indie studio so sure enough it's nothing AAA however the new remake already looks and sounds pretty good! I can already see people complaining about the hexes and lack of multiplayer but neither of those bother me. You can find the announcement videos (they've remade the old intro!), some nice pictures, and game info on their new Steam and GoG pages! But I'll stick a few here too! Trailer/Intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W44WH6pEXHY Dev Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCQHNKX6AtY

Happy belated birthday. This is my 3rd post in 1.5 years :(