Intergalactic News - Issue 28 Message from the editor It has been a swan year here at KJC Games. On the surface it has looked pretty much serene, business as usual but below the surface it has been paddling madly. The reason is that we have finally come to the end of the 10 year office lease. With the vast majority of KJC Games now online their once needed space has long since become expensive storage. The final straw for Phoenix was when Be*, the only reasonable ADSL provider (Cleveleys not qualifying for fibre) sold out to Sky back in March with the immediate downgrading of the upload speed to snail pace. Phoenix was relocated. With Darak living in Stoke, Trev and myself spending more time logging-in remotely and even the accounts long since outsourced the obvious decision was taken not to renew the lease. The farce of travelling all the way across town in order to log into Phoenix being run from my own home was not unnoticed! The plan was two part; simultaneously building an annex to house KJC Games and clearing out 25 years of accumulated junk from the offices. The latter proved to be significantly more work than expected. With three rooms turned over to storing roleplaying, board games and miniatures many of which had not seen the light of day in two decades, maybe I should not have been surprised. If the staggering amount of time spent sorting and selling all the old games was not only tiring enough, the sheer volume of documents, old magazines, abandoned printers, computers and paperwork that needed dealing with was simply horrendous. The latter had to be sorted into keep, confidential shredding and bin. If it wasn’t for a flattened thumb the highlight would have been an afternoon with a big bag of masonry nails and a 3' stack of hard-drives. There was even one that dated back to the early days of KJC, possibly thirty years old. It weighed about 4kg had less than 100meg of space. I gave it a sound whack with the lump hammer but its tank armour simply made it impenetrable. I suspect within were discs made of clay and the writing heads stamped cuneiform. I am now typing this from my nice plush new office, wondering what to do with the 12 unused plug sockets out of the 27 I insisted were wired in. The view is also a vast improvement – I will not miss the back alley with its un-emptied bins (the inspiration for more than one urban sector description), nor the squawking seagulls. This followed by catch-up with governments and infrastructure updates however has meant that things like Intergalactic News have been impossible due to lack of time. Anyway, enough of me rambling on, how about a peak at what Governments and the Species Upgrade mean for the game. Don't worry, there will be another IGN along shortly as articles on terraforming atmospheres and modifying planetary temperatures have already been written. Mica In this issue: Contents Governments Fall of Folkvar Species Upgrade Blog of the Week - A Visit to Hell