Category Archives: gaming

Simplification disaster: The Case of Shafer v Civilization

How does it happen that a shining success fades into failure, that a popular series falls out of favor, that a great product line drops off into obscurity? Those are the questions I’ve pondered for the past few years after my favorite video game series, Sid Meier’s Civilization, went completely off the rails at version five. Ultimately, I think it comes down to losing touch with customers.

Although I’ve never been a big video game player, I’ve somehow been a fan of the Civilization series since it first appeared back in about 1991. Game designer Sid Meier knew how to appeal to my pattern-seeking tendencies and lure me in with his strategically-oriented creations. “Just one more turn, just one more turn,” became a mantra which kept you up deep into the night. Civ begat Civ II which led to Civ III and, by 2005, the pinnacle of the form in Civ IV.

Then came Civ V, a radical departure from all that. Many, many beloved features were watered down, simplified beyond recognition and even tossed aside. Entirely new concepts and metaphors were added, some of which didn’t fit with the rest of the game. Much of the refresh was said to get rid of the boring, micro-managing bits of the game. But in the end, it left a game with too few choices, too few options and too weak a connection to all that came before. My overall opinion of Civ V? YUCK!

The other day, the lead designer of Civ V, Jon Shafer, posted a long retrospective on the game’s development process. One of Shafer’s worst sins appears to have been that he designed the game for the style he liked to play, or perhaps thought was the best way to play, when in fact Civ’s great strength had always been the multiplicity of strategy and tactics that could lead to a fun gaming session.

Take Shafer’s decision to eliminate players’ ability to allocate resources between scientific research, cultural expansion and commercial development. He thought it was “boring busywork” but, of course, it was also one of the most important ways to change tactics, to prepare your empire for war or try to leap ahead in science.

I’ve always found fiddling with sliders in strategy games to be boring busywork, and in that sense I don’t miss them. But the sliders also had a hidden value that I didn’t realize until later – they gave players the ability to shift directions at any time. I’ve written at length about the importance of adaptation in strategy games. Unfortunately, once the sliders were gone players were basically permanently locked into their past economic choices. There was no way to sacrifice research in order to upgrade your army, for example. Rewarding long-term planning is certainly a worthy endeavor, but you still need to provide tools to allow players to change course when necessary.

Following another of his personal preferences, a lot of Shafer’s changes made it all but impossible to build a vast, overarching empire – surely one of the most popular ways to play. Now, he seems to realize that was a mistake, too:

It was virtually impossible to build the large, sprawling empires which had always been a feature in the series and served as the entire point playing for many people. I still believe that there are ways to make smaller empires viable, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of those who enjoy expanding. Penalties should be challenges to overcome, not an insurmountable wall to be frustrated by.

In the post-Steve Jobs era, it’s quite popular to affirm the brilliant visionary view of the world – Shafer caught the attention of Civ’s makers initially with his brilliant game mods for earlier editions. Jobs famously claimed that Apple did no customer research and made products he and his team wanted to use. But I think that ethos takes you only so far. Sometimes it’s better to listen.

Best apps for Amazon Kindle Fire tablets

Two small hardware updates are game changers for Macbook Air and Mac mini

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Apple massively upgraded two of its best hardware products today, the Macbook Air and the Mac mini. There are loads of changes and improvements. But only two are real game changers to me:

1. The addition of a Thunderbolt port on MacBook Airs means you finally will be able¹ to connect external hard drives and get good performance. Until now, the Airs’ combo of small on-board hard drives and only super-slow USB 2.0 ports for external drives was a killer. Consider me in the market.

2. Offering a Mac mini with a real video card option, the AMD Radeon HD 6630M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory. Until now, you could only get the minis with horrific integrated graphics chips that shared the system’s RAM, meaning what might otherwise be the perfect gaming computer (especially with the HDMI port for connecting to your giant screen TV) was useless for high-end games.

Note:
¹That is, when some Thunderbolt-capable external drives hit the market, which is expected real soon now.

The iPad as digital library and other lessons of the first year

Rock, paper scissors: Should I get a Kindle, iPad or MacBook?

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Well, we’ve been Amazon Kindle owners for almost four years now at our house, we’ve had Apple’s iPad for almost a year and we’ve had Mac laptops since too long ago to remember. So we’re getting asked a lot now: Should I buy an iPad or a Kindle? Can I use an iPad instead of a laptop? Do I need a computer to use my Kindle? With all three products hot right now, the answer is sort of like the old game of rock, paper, scissors. Each has different strengths and weaknesses not to mention very different prices. Let’s review some of the basic strengths of each, starting with the cheapest.

Amazon Kindle (3rd generation)

$139 with wifi or $189 with free mobile wireless for life

You are a reader. You always have at least one book on hand, sometimes several. When you finish a book, you simply move on to the next. The Kindle has been carefully honed to meet your needs.

You use it to read in any place you would read a book in the way you would read a book: hold it in one hand, read outside, read inside. There is no backlighting, so if you are in bed at night, you need a lamp. The black and white screen is incredibly easy to read and easy on your eyes — you will never feel the eye fatigue you get from staring at a computer screen all day. And when your eyes are already tired after that long work day, you can adjust the size of the Kindle’s type on the fly.

You want a bring it and forget it device. The Kindle fits in a purse or jacket pocket, weighs practically nothing, the battery lasts for weeks on end. You never need to sync it to a computer ever. Because the wireless connection is built-in and free (it runs on Sprint’s network but you don’t need to know that) you can access the bookstore anywhere, anytime. You can also grab any ebook you’ve ever bought any time from your personal online library maintained by Amazon. Any ebook you buy can also be read on other Kindles you own or on special apps available for most smart phones and computers — or the iPad.

The Kindle has a primitive web browser that works on the free wireless connection. It may be perfect for catching up on news, blogs or other text content but no video or complex stuff at all. There is also a mini-sized built-in keyboard. It’s handy for searching for ebooks in the store, taking a few notes but not much more. Your fingers would cramp and die trying to write the great American ebook novel on this thing.

New versions of the Kindle have historically come out around the holidays so you’re safe buying one now.

Apple iPad 2

$499-$699 with wifi, $629-$829 with mobile wireless (plus monthly contract)

You want to enjoy digital entertainment like music, movies and web sites when you’re not sitting at your desk. The iPad loves to be in the family room, the living room, on the train, at the coffee shop. Its crisp full-color screen, much larger than the Kindles’s and fully back lit, is great if you like watching a lot of video. It also works as an ebook reader with apps for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iBooks (though there is some danger Apple is going to banish its competitors later this year). The back lighting lets you read in bed with no lamp, a feature much appreciated by sleepy spouses.

The iPad is perfect when you need to pull it out quickly and use it for 15 minutes here or 30 minutes there — waiting at the doctor’s office or to board a plane, say. There is no boot-up time, it’s instantly on and, with the mobile wireless models, connected immediately almost anywhere. Great for taking the train to work, waiting at the doctor’s office, 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there.

There is a full strength web browser built in. It’s absolutely great at almost everything but won’t play Flash content (more on that below). You will pay extra, considerably extra, over a Kindle for the iPad models with a mobile wireless connection. You can choose AT&T or Verizon but monthly plans are going to add several hundred dollars a year at least to your total cost of ownership. AT&T’s plans start at $15/month and Verizon’s at $20/month. One way to avoid the bill is to buy the wifi-only model and use your smart phone’s tethering capability or a mobile hotspot like the Verizon mifi.

The iPad can be used like a computer with its on-screen keyboard but it’s best for writing short notes or emails. There is no feeling of physical feedback from pressing each key on screen as there is with a normal keyboard, of course.

The iPad is great with web-based email services like Google’s gMail or Apple’s MobileMe. The built-in iPad email app for old-fashioned email accounts where you download all your mail, however, remains rather limited. Compared to Apple’s desktop email, the iPad version lacks basic features like spam filtering and folders.

The iPad is a great device to review or present large documents, spreadsheets or PDFs. It’s not bad for typing documents but has only limited formatting options, which can cause huge problems if you are planning to move files back and forth with a PC. And it is pretty darn horrible for spreadsheets, which cry out for a mouse and full keyboard.

The iPad is at its best showing off personal photos and home movies to friends, offering amazing slide shows anywhere you happen to be. I mean really great. The feeling of pulling up photos, zooming in and out and flicking around your albums all with your fingers in comtrol is constant fun. The iPad is less great for organizing or editing photos but you can do that on your computer and sync them over.

The iPad is part of Apple’s vast and growing iOS app ecosystem. There are thousands of great games and zillions more apps to do all sorts of things, guide you through the Louvre, track your eBay bidding, download digital comic books and on and on.

We have found that the iPad is the perfect second computer if you already have a computer for work. Get your personal life off your company’s computer (really, you should!). The iPad is light enough that you can travel with both. It now has a built in camera so you can do video chatting on the go, too.

The iPad is also kid-proof and there are lots of kid friendly games. It’s like letting the kids play in a sandbox — they can’t mess it up the way they inevitably seem to mess up full-powered computers.

There are a few weaknesses versus the Kindle or the MacBook Air. The iPad is too heavy to hold in one hand so it doesn’t work if you’re standing up on the subway or trying to use it in a cramped space where the Kindle is great. Also unlike the Kindle, the iPad does want to be synced to a computer. That’s the only way to back up your stuff and the only sane way to re-arrange your app icons if you have more than a few. And storage space can easily get tight, requiring that you sync big files like movies or TV shows back and forth with your computer.

The battery lasts for a day, maybe even for two, but then needs to be recharged. And, without getting too deep in a matter of some controversy, the iPad is not compatible with Adobe Flash so there are web sites that you cannot see (like those for some high-end restaurants and hotels) and you cannot view flash videos or play flash games (hello Club Penguin). And Apple does not let you add your own favorite web browser to your iPad.

The updated iPad 2 came out almost a year after the first iPad and while there are some vague rumors of an update in the fall, again I think it’s a pretty safe time to buy now.

The 11″ MacBook Air

$999-$1299

Another contender in the mobile and useful computing category is Apple’s new MacBook Air with an 11″ screen. It is about the same size as an iPad though almost twice as heavy (2.3 lb versus 1.3 lb).

The MacBook Air is one of the most powerful and capable laptops in the history of the category we used to call ultraportable. It has a full-size keyboard and is ready for serious writing, document creation, photo editing, pretty much any task you want to throw at a regular computer, all in a super-portable package. Load up a full copy of Microsoft Office, Adobe Lightroom or Apple’s Garageband and get to work. Spreadsheet jockeys will be happy with the trackpad. You can easily do serious emailing using Apple’s email or whatever software you like.

The web browser on the MacBook Air is a full-powered browser capable of displaying, with the correct plug-in, all flash-based web sites. You can also choose to add any browser you prefer like Firefox of Chrome.

But it’s also small enough to make for a fine movie player on the couch or in bed. You can run the Kindle ereader app for Mac and use it as an ereader, too.

Battery life is reported at 5 hours. There are no built in mobile wireless options but it’s easy enough to get a mobile wifi hotspot like Sprint’s Overdrive or Verizon’s Mifi for on-the-go connectivity.

MacBook Airs have gone a long time between updgrades so even though the current model came out almost six months ago, I’d also put this in the safe to buy now category.

Rock, paper, scissors:

As you may have gleaned from the above discussion, there is plenty of overlap in the uses and capabilities of these three great gadgets but also some major gaps for each. The Kindle may be the “paper” covering the iPad “rock” if you want to read on the subway, but that same iPad “rock” may break the Macbook “scissors” if you want to watch YouTube videos instead. Hence, if you have the budget, you might be well-served with more than one or even all three. And remember, a family with kids that owns an iPad is a family shopping for a second iPad. And a family with kids and two iPads is a family shopping for…well, you get the point.

Additional links of interest:

CNet’s Brooke Crothers has a good piece looking at an iPad2 versus the Macbook Air for all his mobile computing needs.

Trouble finding the best blu-ray versions of Harry Potter

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I’ve written before about the difficulty of finding blu-ray movies that look good and avoiding those that look worse in high-definition. Certainly, the modern and lushly filmed Harry Potter film series looks good in blu-ray. But which edition should you buy? Regular blu-ray disks or the pricey ultimate editions.

Unfortunately, the Warner Brothers studio has made this choice a lot harder than it should be by changing their ultimate edition playbook midway through the release schedule. The first two ultimates, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, included extended movies with deleted scenes added back into the full flick. They also had copies of so-called digital editions that you can load directly onto an iPod or other portable devices.

But the next two ultimates, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, veered away from the fan-friendly model of releases one and two. These editions shuffled the extra scenes to another disk, so no “extended” cut of the movie is available. And the iPod-friendly digital editions have to be downloaded off the web.

Not surprisingly, the two later disks have been hit by a one-star rating campaign on Amazon. These kind of campaigns can bite, as we saw recently with the Lord of the Rings blu ray disks.

Depending on your blu-ray budget, it also may be worth factoring into your decision equation that Amazon is selling a bundle of the basic versions of all six movies for under $70 while each of the first four ultimate versions costs at least $34.

Earlier Coverage: One star boycotts may be working (10/4/2010)

Review: Top 10 reasons why Civ V is awful (updated)

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Civilization five game box

(UPDATE in February 2013 — The argument is over, people. Civ V designer Jon Shafer finally comes clean and admits he didn’t know what the heck he was doing, didn’t think through most of the changes he made to the franchise and simply didn’t appreciate how many players actually played the game. Oy vey. Here’s my take on Shafer’s admissions.)

(UPDATE in June 2012 — This two-year-old post still draws a fair amount of traffic so I wanted to clarify that it’s a review of the game as originally released back in 2010 and I long ago stopped playing, obviously. But Civ V remains by far the lowest-rated versions by players and a recent review of the Gods & Kings add-on pack, which restored religion and espionage two years too late, found it equally lacking.)

The game Sid Meier’s Civilization V came out last week, though it sounds like good master Sid has little to do with it. At least I hope not. Hardcore fans of the Civ franchise should avoid this train wreck. Civ V is just awful, unbearably bad, compared the preceding versions. The publisher removed many great features and left in their place a beautifully rendered and lobotomized exercise in boredom. Ugh. We’re reverting to playing Civ IV in our house.

Here are at least 10 reasons why Civ V is awful:

10. City-states: For four versions, the computer AI controlled opposing civilizations. Now, in addition to full-blown civs, the computer also controls minor city-states. And these city-states, which are scattered all over the place, constantly send you messages asking for things or complaining. Yet the payoff for allying with a city-state is pretty minor. Wow. Boring.

9. City defenses: Here’s a recurring theme you’ll hear a lot in this review. Civ V simplifies the task of defending cities to the point where there is little thought or strategy involved. Cities automatically defend themselves and the only aspect you can influence is by building a few structures. No keeping troops in a city at all. Bizarre. Boring.

8. City squares: In the old Civ, cities expanded in big chunks at a time when culture points built up to a certain level. This made generating culture points important at the individual city level. In Civ V, cities barely expand at all. Most expansion requires you purchase extra spaces one at a time. This is boring micromanagement (“Hmm, should I pay 60 gold for that grassland space or 120 gold for the one with the hills?”) and takes too long to expand.

7. No more stacking units: In Civ V, only one unit can occupy a space at a time. No more stacks. That’s all well and good until you have a couple of dozen units covering everything on the map and moving all over the place for no reason because you can’t stack them where you want them. And Civ V brings back the odious and annoying “zone of control” that prevents a unit from moving through free spaces next to enemy units. Blech.

6. Wonders diminished: Building famous wonders of the world is one of the most fun parts of playing Civ, no? But in Civ V, not only are there fewer wonders but the unique powers of wonders have been so diminished you’ll wonder about the point of building them. Each wonder is reduced to one incredibly simple power and adds almost nothing in the way of cultural expansion points. And did I mention that cultural points have been reduced to irrelevance?

5. Leaders diminished: As with wonders, the unique abilities of the leaders of each civ have been reduced and there are fewer leaders to choose from. I’ll make this the last point along these lines but will note here that civ-specific buildings and units are also simplified and reduced in importance. Everything is simplified and reduced in importance as far as I can tell.

4. Espionage removed: Want to prepare for a coming war by hassling a foe in secret? Or try to undermine a competitor without resorting to open warfare? What about just getting info on a hostile opponent? Stealing tech? Not in Civ V where the entire spying and espionage system has been removed.

3. Useless graphics: Isn’t it cool to sit around and watch a dozen tiny individual soldiers battle each other in great detail for ever single fight? No? What about upping the computing power required by turning formerly darkened spaces into beautiful, swirling fog covered spaces? No? What a waste.

2. Steam required: You can’t play Civ V without installing Steam, an annoying and persistent online game playing system that crams itself into the plumbing of your Windows installation, pops up annoying messages and adds nothing to the game unless you play over the Internet. In Civ IV, you could choose to use Steam but now it’s mandatory even for those of us who never play over the Internet. Requiring persistent software that gums up Windows and won’t go away? Yuck.

And finally, the #1 reason Civ V is awful: Elimination of religion and general irrelevance of culture. A great addition to Civ IV, probably the best, was introducing religions and using cultural points to regulate border expansion. Religions also played a big role in diplomatic relations and early scientific research. All eliminated. Blech.

Extra bonus reasons why Civ V is awful: loss of control over spending on tech, culture and other priorities. Elimination of trading techs with other civs. Oversimplification of government civics. Allowing military units to cross water without boats. Happiness and health no longer tracked city by city but empire wide — well, health has been eliminated but happiness is empire wide. I could go on and on…

Extra extra bonus: How in the heck did major gaming magazines not pick up on how awful this game is?

Some commenters like the game, as is their right. Please keep comments civil.

New version of Civ? New Windows box

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Well, it happens every four or five years and it’s happening again. Firaxis is about to release a new version of the extremely fun and highly addictive computer game Civilization (Civ V, if you must know) and so we need to build a new Windows PC. It could be months or even years before the powers that be get around to issuing a Mac port of the game and we just don’t want to wait around. As I blogged about the last few times, here are few key choices I made in building the PC and why I made them.

1. I bought a Shuttle mini PC case

We had gone away from Shuttle the past few iterations, using MSI and Acer ASUS bare bones boxes. But the Shuttle is considerably smaller and more elegant. There is no need for extra hard drives or other bulky components that would not fit in the compact Shuttle case. And Shuttle has expanded interior room available for the graphics card. So I spent a little extra and got an SH55-J2-BK-V1. Now how about improving those model names?

2. I picked an Intel i5 CPU running at 3.33 GHz with dual cores

This is not a cheap chip but has a fast clock speed and 4 MB of speedy cache memory as well (more detail). I could have spent more for more cores but we’re not going to be using a lot of software built to take advantage of multi-cores. In some recent computer reviews, chips with higher clock speeds and fewer cores actually outperformed much more expensive chips with lots of cores and slower clock speeds.

3. I spent more than usual on the graphics card

I bought a Powercolor AX5770 running a Radeon HD5770 chip with 512 MB of RAM, which the Tomshardware site recently picked as one of the best video card under $200. In the past, assuming graphics weren’t that important to a game of Civ, I have cheaped out on video cards. But the folks over at Firaxis seem determined to add as much eye candy as possible. Thay left our system crawling a bit sometimes with Civ IV, so I’ve spent a little more (about $150) this time around.

4. I went a little crazy and decided to try an SSD hard drive

There are a gazillion spinning platters covered with bits of data around our house but the latest fashion in computer storage is a disk that doesn’t spin. So-called solid-state drives are pretty much just like the flash memory drives you use in your digital camera to store pictures. They’re a lot faster and quieter than ordinary hard drives though a lot more expensive per gigabyte. I could only afford an 80 GB model in this PC’s budget and it was still the most expensive single component. We’ll see…

5. I bought a copy of Windows 7 Home premium

Past gaming boxes made due with really old versions of Windows until I picked up some copies of Windows Vista at a CompUSA going out of business sale. But now XP is just too ancient and copies of the well-reviewed latest OS from Redmond are running at less than $99.

More as we play it out.

Apple’s iPad may be the perfect computer for kids

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I’m excited about Apple’s new iPad for a couple of reasons. While a lot of the iPad’s features and services had been leaked in advance, I found myself gasping along with the audience in San Francisco when the price was announced. This is a product that is going to have vastly more impact for under $500 than it would have had at $800 or $1,000. And as I’ve pondered the iPad’s possibilities for the past day or so, one particular use has begun to dominate my thinking and that’s the iPad as the perfect starter computer for my pre-teen kids.

The three kids in our family are a pretty tech savvy bunch, with their iPods and Nintendos, PSPs and Wii. They’re also happy for all the time they can get with mom and dad’s laptops, desktops and the Kindle. They know how to work Tivo, download from iTunes and find stuff on YouTube. They need a lot of supervision and we’re seemingly forever in search of the perfect parental controls and web filters that will let them access all that’s good and fun while protecting them from all the garbage and viruses and worse.

But I have to say, the more I think about it, the more perfect the iPad seems as a solution. One of the biggest problem the kids have is dealing with the complexity and fragile nature of our current computers, running either Mac or Windows. It’s just too easy for the mouse cursor to get lost, file systems to overwhelm and key settings to get munged. On one computer the kids use, flash was somehow disabled one day and won’t come back no matter how much re-installing and uninstalling I’ve done. Another laptop last only a few weeks before they had it unable to boot. It’s not maliciousness or ignorance on their part. Modern PCs just remain pretty darn delicate and temperamental beasts.

The iPad does away with much of this complexity and hides much of what ails the modern PC. Simple is good. No mouse — use your finger. No searching for missing files — they’re all inside each application just when you want them. And no complicated and mysterious settings and system files just waiting to be accidentally deleted. Some people call the iPad/iPhone software platform a “sandbox” due to its limitations but what better metaphor for the kind of computing environment my kids need than a sandbox?

The kids get homework but they hardly need a full-powered copy of Word or Excel to complete it. The iWorks programs look more than adequate. They need a physical keyboard, I’d expect, for the occasional short essay but thankfully Steve Jobs has seen fit — finally — to let use Bluetooth keyboards with the iPad (a feature that would REALLY come in handy with the iPhone, but I digress). And they need a browser but one simpler and safer from malware than the average copy on a PC.

Of course, like all their little digerati friends, the kids are both big consumers and producers of digital media. They take pictures and make movies, record their own songs and even try their hand at blogging. They watch shows downloaded from iTunes or the Tivo or on YouTube or other sites. They play with Ze Frank’s funny frog, use Club Penguin and all the wonderful games PBS has created to accompany its television shows. Flash limitations aside, I think they can do most or all of this stuff on the iPad. And once Amazon ports its Kindle app, they won’t even have to borrow mine anymore. Hallelujah.

I’ve got a couple of months to keep thinking about this and I’m interested in your thoughts as well as the likely stream of additional information that will be flowing out of Cupertino. On the parental controls front, for example, I’m disappointed with what Apple offers for the iPhone/iPod Touch platform and I’m hoping for far more on the iPad. For homework, we’re really going to need to be able to connect to a printer, too. So please weigh in if you have any thoughts and stay tuned for more details.

UPDATE: Over on Twitter, Mark Nikolewski says his four- and seven-year-olds mainly use web sites with embedded games and videos that rely on Adobe’s flash plug-in. There’s no flash on the iPhone and so far none on the iPad. This is a problem but maybe Apple and Adobe get with it? Wired, John Gruber and other Mac followers are less than optimistic. Web sites could, however, offer alternatives if the iPad caught on. They already do so in some cases for the iPhone. Why wouldn’t Disney, with Steve Jobs on the board, want to make an iPad app version of Club Penguin, for example?

UPDATE2: A couple of other folks channeling this same idea include Warren Buckleitner over on the New York Times Gadgetwise blog and, surprisingly, Dallas Mavericks owner and frequent Internet buffoon Mark Cuban. He’s right on when he writes:

It will be the product that kids of this generation grow up with and look back on with affection just like we did with the first video games. Video games changed how we grew up. The iPad will change how kids today grow up.

Apple makes deleting a Boot Camp partition super easy

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A couple of years back, when I upgraded the hard drive on my then-new Macbook Pro, I used Apple’s incredible Boot Camp software to install Windows Vista. Using Boot Camp, you’re not just simulating running Windows under Mac OS X — you can actually boot up into “pure” Windows on your Apple hardware. The only complication was that Boot Camp required its own bit of my hard drive, it’s own partition in techno-speak, for the exclusive use of Windows. So I handed over 50 GB of my practically-empty 250 GB drive.

More recently, three trends have come together to make me regret that partitioning decision. First, the remaining 200 GB left to Mac OS X has gotten increasingly tight. With the growing library of all my iPod media on my laptop, I was down to only 25 GB of free space recently. Second, I have VMWare Fusion to run Windows virtually without having to reboot out of Mac OS X. Fusion used to lack some important features, like graphics acceleration, but it has improved and improved to the point where everything I need to do under Windows (stupid Sony digital recorder, I’m talking to you) works fine in Fusion.

And third, the only real reason I needed to run Windows Vista under Boot Camp (instead of just simulating it under VMWare Fusion), was to play games — well, really just one game, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword, which was never released for the Mac. Until now!

Not needing that Windows partition anymore, I fretted that recovering the space and adding to my main partition would entail some litany of horrors like: back up every single thing, erase the whole drive, reinstall every single thing and, all the while, make plenty of sacrifices to the PC gods of yore.

Instead, it was drop-dead simple and completely painless. How to eliminate a Boot Camp Windows partition without breaking a sweat? Just run Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant program. Choose the option that says add or remove a Boot Camp partition. Recognizing that I already had a Boot Camp partition, the program automatically began the removal sequence. Just follow the directions and watch as 50 GB of ugly fat disappear and your Mac OS X drive gets more room to breath in under 2 minutes:

For what it’s worth, I also worried that I had to somehow deactivate or uninstall the copy of Windows Vista I was about to blow up in case I every wanted to use the same install disk on some future home brew PC. But there’s no way to deactivate Vista. Basically, you just go ahead and re-use the install disk. If the new OS installation won’t activate, you call Microsoft and tell them what’s what and they let you re-use the software. Or so I’m told, anyway.

Gravitational Pull

A blog about technology and other things I'm interested in