This just hit me like a ton of bricks.
The first vault on EOS, where you get a real good look at the massive structure inside that goes into the vault's operation and it's atmospheric processing (if not other things as well) - all of a sudden reminded me of the 1990 Total Recall atmospheric processor on Mars. Even starts up in a similar way.
Am I just imagining how closely the two resemble each other?
LOL The Citadel reminds me of Babylon5... And the Asari reminds me of the Delvians from Farscape. They are blue, have long lifespans, loves sex(in fact if I recall correctly think it's more mental than physical like the asari melding process), Zhann(the Delvian character in Farscape) uses the phrase "By the Goddess"... (farscape is aired in 1999, babylon 5 in 1994.)
http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Delvian
Found one more article,
http://sadgeezer.com/Farscape-Cultures-Delvians.htm
It's long so here's an extract:
"The man Zhaan killed was her lover – she killed him while in Union – a kind of merging of minds and souls which seems to be the Delvian equivalent to sex."
Errr... Reminds me of the Ardat Yakshi....
Fine line cutting across inspiration and plagiarism...
There's nothing new under the sun? It does have a Total Recall feel.
Most fiction borrows or builds on what came before it, with twists and interpretations that make it unique. It becomes harder and harder to think of something nobody has ever done before when you continually add to both the number of people creating things and the time they have been creating them. If you add the laws of physics in there, however loosely, there are only so many ways you can terraform without going completely alien or deux ex machina.
You have to have machines (something autonomous, capable of function in hostile environment, self repairing/replicating, doesn't care about time or scale) that do something, and on a gigantic scale (even if they were nanomachines), and they have to get power/material from somewhere. It is going to be advanced alien to us - if some undiscovered race did it and since we cannot do it ourselves.
Also got that impression when I was playing the game. But that just added to the currently growing list of deja vus I had back then. However, nothing that really bothered me.
At least it feels like terraforming is not only about heating and melting ice and then, click, a whole planet comes into a better shape, like Mars in that AS's movie.
