The initial release of Sword of the Stars II was possibly the most shambolic release of a game I have ever seen, it made Master of Orion 3 look like a masterpiece of finished product.

A year on, and free to people who didn't take up the refund offer on the original, the Enhanced Edition finally shows what Sword of the Stars II should have been on release - a worthy successor to the ground-breaking original. It took them a while, but they got there in the end.

There's still a few rough edges, and some of the easy accessibility of the original is gone, but the sequel shows that they're still willing to challenge some of the design conventions that 4X games all-too-often find themselves blindly defaulting to.

Being an avid Charles Stross reader, both fiction and blog, I had heard the name Karl Schroeder mentioned a few times and even read some of his guest posts on Charlie's blog, and I eventually picked up one of his books from the local Forbidden Planet: Sun of Suns.

Set in a free-fall air bubble the size of a planet, it's a blend of swashbuckling "airships on mars"-style derring-do, political intrigue, and hints of post-human futurism.