A 3D, first person pacman clone that I played on a 286 MS DOS laptop in the nineties. I don’t remember its name and I’ve never seen it since.
A programming game from the early 2000s called something like Fleet Commander. (But none of the many games named something like Fleet Commander that I can currently find online are it.) This game had a VB-inspired, event driven programming language. You used it to command fighters, bombers and fleet command ships. Each ship had its own AI script it would execute.
AI is a forever-in-the-future technology. When I was in school, fuzzy logic controllers were an active area of “AI” research. Now they are everywhere and you’d be laughed at for calling them AI.
The thing is, as soon as AI researchers solve a problem, that solution no longer counts as AI. Somehow it’s suddenly statistics or “just if-then statements”, as though using those techniques makes something not artificial intelligence.
For context, I’m of the opinion that my washing machine - which uses sensors and fuzzy logic to determine when to shut off - is a robot containing AI. It contains sensors, makes judgements based on its understanding of “the world” and then takes actions to achieve its goals. Insofar as it can “want” anything, it wants to separate the small masses from the large masses inside itself and does its best to make that happen. As tech goes, it’s not sexy, it’s very single purpose and I’m not really worried that it’s gonna go rogue.
We are surrounded by (boring) robots all day long. Robots that help us control our cars and do our laundry. Not to mention all the intelligent, disembodied agents that do things like organize our email, play games with us, and make trillions of little decisions that affect our lives in ways large and small.
Somehow, though, once the mystery has yielded to math, society doesn’t believe these decision-making machines are AI any longer.
Sorry, I missed one more critical detail there… This game was in space! Played on a 2D, wraparound surface, with a top-down perspective, but it was definitely in space.
The fighters were fast and cheap but weak and could only shoot lasers.
The bombers were slower but tougher and could fire missiles. (Missiles could also be scripted, come to think of it. And if you made them stop, they turned into mines)
The fleet ships could manufacture other ships. You only have a single fleet ship at the start, but as time goes on, you can build more. …if you haven’t spent all your resources on building fighters and bombers.
Ok, so the resource allocation of the moon/earth society is completely broken and the moon-dwelling oligarchs sucked. Agreed.
But the end of the movie makes the computer system unable to differentiate between the handful of moon lords vs the unwashed masses on the earth’s surface. There are not enough resources to go around in Elysium. All that medicine and food from the moon bastards is gonna run out in about ten minutes and then the last bits of society will finish collapsing. Any hope of ever rebuilding a functioning society ends about a week after the end of that movie.
I like Generations way more than say, First Contact.
Generations, for all its flaws, was a science fiction story passing the torch from TOS to TNG, and saying something about the characters and world of Star Trek.
First Contact was a generic action-adventure movie wearing a Star Trek uniform.
Honestly, I consider Generations to be the only interesting TNG movie.
I like both movies, but I think The Matrix has a billion times more spectacle going for it. I still think about The Thirteenth Floor regularly, but I’d rather sit down and watch The Matrix again for entertainment’s sake.
Ah! A fellow holder of the belief that time travel stories are better when they are internally consistent! I hate e.g. Looper for having time travel that makes no goddamn sense. It takes me out of the story when the characters are literally watching the timeline change before them as it magically radiates out from one point. And then our protagonists somehow remember the original timeline… Bah.
…So I must ask - have you seen Primer? If not, maybe you’d like it!