When I went back to re-download and play Surviving The Aftermath, I also noticed that Surviving Mars was in my library. I guess I must've bought it a while back on sale and forgotten about it. Due to the similarities of the name, I mistakenly thought that these 2 games were developed by the same studio, so I downloaded both. I had also seen some headlines and social media posts about controversy regarding a "Re-Launched" version of Surviving Mars. I wasn't quite sure what was going on there, but I decided to give the original game a test run and see if the Re-Launched version would be something I might like to try. If Re-Launched fixed some of the complaints that I had with the original game, than maybe I would upgrade to that. Or at least, that's what naive me thought.

After playing for a day or 2, I was liking Surviving Mars, so I went to the Steam page to see how cheap the upgrade to Re-Launched is. That is when I realized what all the controversy is about.

Paradox, in it's infinitely consumer-unfriendly wisdom, decided to make Surviving Mars: Re-Launched into a completely new game; it is not an upgrade or update to the original game! Paradox is selling Re-Launched at full price, even if you already have the original game. Worse yet, Re-Launched is basically a "complete edition" of the game, with all the DLC expansions packaged in, and with a slight graphics update. The original game looks fine as is, so I don't think a graphics update was necessary. But they also de-listed the original game, and all of its DLC expansions, so that if you own the original game, you cannot buy any of the expansions!

Re-Launched is not an update to Surviving Mars; it is a separate, full-priced release on Steam.

This is a kick in the gut to anybody who bought the original version of the game. Especially if you never got around to buying the DLC, and are now completely locked out of being able to do so.

I'm sorry, but this is basically strike 3 for Paradox. I gave them plenty of chances to right their ship, but they have now completely capsized and have lost all of my good will. They bungled the premature release of Star Trek: Infinite and killed that game basically out of the gate. They then went on to do the same thing to Cities Skylines II, and then fired Colossal Order from its own series. And now there's these shenanigans with Surviving Mars. This is all on top of all the older controversy involving Paradox's greedy piecemeal DLC pricing, releasing updates to games that make old saves incompatible, and releasing games that felt generally incomplete.

I have had it with Paradox! I don't think I can buy another game from Paradox, and I am actually starting to feel guilty for playing the Paradox games that I already own. It's a shame too, because Paradox, as a publisher, sells games that are right up my alley. They specialize in strategy, management, and simulation games -- often with historic or sci-fi themes. Now I feel like I can't play any of these games, or else I'm giving money and support to a company that might very well be the sleaziest, greediest, and overall worst game publisher on the market right now. Possibly as bad or worse than the likes of Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and 2K.

I don't know, maybe Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and 2K are still far worse. I haven't been keeping up as much with news on those companies since I haven't been on social media as much, and since I actively avoid their games (other than buying used copies of EA's football games). On top of all that, Stephanie Sterling hasn't been making new Jimquisition episodes (now rebranded as "High-Steph") to tell me all about the evils of these companies and their executives. Well, except for a recent episode that reminded everyone of former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick's close association with convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein...

This morning, the first step on the road to a manned mission to Mars was taken. NASA's Orion space capsule successfully completed its first dual-orbital test flight and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

The space craft finally launched this morning from Cape Canaveral Air Force base a little after 7 am Eastern time, after having been delayed for a day due to technical problems and poor weather. After a four-and-a-half-hour flight in which the spacecraft orbited the Earth twice at an altitude of 3600 miles, the capsule re-entered the atmosphere, deployed its parachutes, and landed gently in the Pacific Ocean.

This flight is the first step in a planned manned mission to Mars that is expected to take place within the next 25 years, assuming that it doesn't get derailed by political or monetary issues.

This is exactly the kind of mission that advocates argued would be encouraged by the termination of the space shuttle program. Critics argued that the space shuttle made access to earth's orbit too easy and reliable, and "tethered" NASA to low-earth orbit, instead of finding innovative new ways to reach further into space...

Concept of the IXS Enterprise

Recently, a NASA physicist Harold G. White made headlines in the science and technology media by showcasing a 3-D artist's render of a "real life" warp drive starship (affectionately named the "I.X.S. Enterprise" - not sure what the "I.X.S." stands for). The starship model poposed is based on mathametical calculations that suggest that the Alcubierre warp drive could actually work!

In the 1990's, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, mathematically demonstrated that a warp field could be created which could contract the space ahead of an object and expand the space behind said object, allowing the warping of space to effectively propel the object faster than the speed of light. The theory does not violate the "cosmic speed limit" imposed by relativity, since the object isn't being accelerated past the speed of light. Instead, the space around it is being manipulated to reduce the distance between the source and the destination by taking advantage of the fact that space itself is permeable and its motion is not constrained to the cosmic speed limit. Best of all: astronauts inside such a ship would not be subject to relativistic time dilation effects. A one-year trip for the astronauts would also be only one year for the people of earth!

One of Matt Jefferies' original concepts for Star Trek's starship Enterprise.

Alcubierre freely admitted that his ideas were inspired by concepts from Star Trek, and considering that no similar theory of warp propulsion existed at the time of Star Trek, the concept and designs of the show are surprisingly prophetic. Alcubierre's models were met with early excitement when they were first proposed, but examinations by other physicists exposed certain flaws that made the effect impractical for human space exploration and travel:

• The drive would require a tremendous amount of energy ranging from the equivalent of the total mass of Jupiter to the more mass than is contained in the observable universe! This, by itself, made the theory a non-starter.
• The drive also may not be steerable or controllable from within the ship.
• Also, there were concerns that a build-up of particles along the front of the bubble during travel would be shot forward when the drive slows down or stops, potentially destroying anything in its path (including the destination, whether it be a planet, another ship, or a space station).
• There were also concerns about whether Hawking radiation inside the bubble would destabilize the bubble and/or kill the crew.

But that hasn't stopped physicists from thinking about the possibility...