I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.
In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.
To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.
Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
michael said 4:52PM on 10-23-2007
I still find Windows Live Translator to be the better of the two, especially with showing 2 dynamic website panes in different formats, but it's good to see Google step up and raise the bar.
It might encourage Live Translator and Babelfish to do something new too.
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McQ said 1:36PM on 10-24-2007
Try this bit of doggerel: "Smart cars grow faster with jelly legs.". Nonsense, but not difficult to translate. In French, Systrans provided the reasonable result: "Les voitures intelligentes se développent plus rapidement avec des jambes de gelée.", whereas Google could only do "Smart voitures croître plus vite avec les jambes de gelée."
I'll stick to babel fish, thanks.
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Vadim Berman said 7:34AM on 11-12-2007
It's not like there are just two of them, Google and SYSTRAN.
The choice is much bigger, and the results are frequently better (e.g., IBM's WTS, or Promt), but most of the higher end ones are corporation oriented.
But yes, pure statistical MT is definitely not the way to go; despite the popular opinion, NIST's 2006 evaluation results do not reflect the quality accurately:
http://forum.digitalsonata.com/forums/thread/32.aspx
One thing which the result is a mysterious figure which no one sees, such as PageRank, and another is outputting human language, which requires much higher accuracy.
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