Even before humans decided that capitalism was their religion, the Ishendi were different. Their colony had originally been founded by members of a philosophical sect dedicated to living a more principled life. Over time, the Ishendi came to be seen as more militaristic than some of the other members of the TEC. The Ishendi tended to have little patience with the subtleties of contracts when some of the more slippery members of Trader Space did not fulfill their end of bargains. A thousand ye...

According to GameRankings.com , a site that simply takes the review scores from the major gaming publications and averages them, the top 14 games of last year (as many as I can fit into a screenshot) were:  

Shipping weight is 1.5 pounds. So we can reduce the shipping costs! yay!

Plymouth MI - Stardock announced today that it will be developing The Political Machine 2008, a PC strategy game that lets gamers take a shot at running for President. The game allows players to design a candidate or choose a pre-existing one and campaign across the country against either a human opponent or a computer controlled opponent.  Candidates have many resources available at their disposal to both build themselves up and tear their opponent down including speeches, advertisi...

In 2004, Stardock released The Political Machine. In it, players picked a candidate and ran for President of the United States. Players could compete against either human controlled opponents over a LAN or via the Internet or against computer opponents controlled by Stardock's notorious computer AI. For 2008, Stardock has gone back and re-envisioned how the game should would.  Using an all-new 3D engine, players can now design their own opponents (bobble-heads) and compete not just i...

Aura was a WindowBlinds skin originally created for WindowBlinds 5 on Windows XP awhile back. It was actually one of the first skins that Stardock itself actually was involved in the design. Until recently, Stardock focused strictly on the software. It made WindowBlinds and left it to skin authors to make skins.  The the feature set of WindowBlinds became more rich, it became increasingly difficult for skin authors to make full use of all the new features. Moreover, Stardock wanted t...

After more than a couple of years of work, Sins of a Solar Empire has gone gold. What an incredible journey it's been.  For the past year, Stardock, the developers of Galactic Civilizations and Ironclad, a new company made up of developers who worked on Homeworld: Cataclysm have been working together to try to create a 4X RTS.  Stardock and Ironclad pushed the release date back a few times to ensure that there was plenty of time to incorporate the features they wanted in as well a...

  Elegance selecting files in explorer. Subtle and clean.   Visual Studio (you can see where VS hard codes its own scrollbars. Tsk tsk).

  For nearly a decade, Object Desktop has been the premiere solution users of Windows to turbo-charge their desktop experience. In 2008, we're going to see some of our biggest changes yet.   Preliminaries Starting this year, Stardock is going to create two versions of Object Desktop. There will be normal Object Desktop which will have the core parts of the suite (WindowBlinds, IconPackager, DesktopX, etc.) and Object Desktop Ultimate which will a lot more programs in it. All pr...

Stardock has around 60 people total working full time.  That may seem like a lot but relatively speaking, we're tiny. Most companies this size would have a single product.  By contrast, we develop and publish a lot of products. Here is our schedule for 2008 on major releases.   January: MyColors 2008 CursorFX February: Sins of a Solar Empire DeskScapes 2.0 <Confidential Release> JoeUser.com V2 March: IconPackager 4 Objec...

Yikes!   http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/01/worlds-smallest.html

If you're like me, you like USB flash memory keys.  And if you're like me, you don't keep critical documents on them because you are always painfully aware that losing a USB key is pretty easy. SanDisk apparently has been listening and has announced two features that come with the new Cruzer Titanium Plus. First, there's BeinSync, this new service automatically takes what you have on your USB key and securely transfers it to a secure SanDisc on-line repository. If you lose your memory...

This week I traveled to LA to appear on TV (you can see my demo here ). Naturally, it rained on us the whole time. But we had a good time visiting gaming websites. It's a bit of a bummer that I can't hang out more with other gamers my age. Getting together with the gaming press is often the closest I get to "being with my own kind" (i.e. into PC games, and 35+ years old). Here's some pictures I took: The pigeons are really tame in LA.   The writer's strik...

What is the ideal ultra-portable? What is the minimum functionality for a device that you could truly use on the road? Here are my specs: Must be able to run Windows Vista or whatever is the current desktop Microsoft OS. NOT Windows Mobile. The keyboard has to be big enough to be able to touch type comfortably. It should have a trackpoint (little eraser thing that Thinkpads have) so that i don't require an extra mouse or lose space to a touch pad. Lots of ports and support for 3...