Tag Civilization V

Civilized

By Brian Filed in Misc Tagged with Civilization IV, Civilization V September 27th, 2010 @ 10:41 am

Probably going to be a quiet week on this site.

Everything involved with getting Civ V up and running has gone surprisingly smoothly. I was able to finally get BootCamp to partition my MacBook hard drive, and once that was done, the rest of the Windows install went off without a hitch. The Civ V disk arrived nice and early on Saturday morning, and the game runs quite well even though the MacBook’s hardware specs are only up to the minimum specs for the game. Given the usual barrage of “this game won’t run on my computer” posts on the assorted forums, I expected a lot more trouble getting started.

First impressions: it definitely is NOT an improvement over the final iteration of Civ IV. It looks great, but they’ve taken what was the best accomplishment of Civ IV, which was to streamline the game to reduce overall playing time for a single game, and thrown it right out the window. It took me somewhere on the order of 12 hours to play a full game on Saturday playing at “standard” game speed, and 8 hours playing at “quick” speed on Sunday, whereas Civ IV had made it possible to play a normal game in about 4 hours. There are also a lot of little interface aggravations to work out, as well as some flat-out bugs and mistakes to fix. On the upside, it does force the player to rethink entrenched strategies that may not work so well anymore. Also, I *hate* the emphasis on the city-states. They need to dial this back quite a bit. I’d say this is a solid initial release, but I really hope that the inevitable expansion packs work out the kinks the same way they did with Civ IV.

I don’t see myself becoming hopelessly engrossed in this game, but I was so ready for a refresh from Civ IV that I’m glad to have it. So, I don’t expect to pull any all-nighters like in the Civ II days, nor playing it for an hour or two here and there as became my Civ IV habit. I’ll spend some time with it for a couple more days for sure, but then I’ll be back.

Oh, and I got a huge kick out of this video (don’t bother watching if you’re not a Civver, it’s strictly for the fans):

Quivering With Anticipation

By Brian Filed in Misc Tagged with Bristol Palin, Civilization V, Dancing With The Stars September 20th, 2010 @ 2:19 pm

No, not because tonight is the season premiere for “Dancing With The Stars”. I’m still holding out a last glimmer of hope that Levi Johnston will dive out of the audience, grab Bristol out of Mark Balas’s arms and whisk her back to the wilds of Alaska, neither of them ever to be heard from again.

My breath holds and a small bit of drool hangs pendulously from the end of my lolling tongue because tomorrow is the official launch date for Civilization V.

The Civ V Facebook page has been whipping the fanbois into a total frenzy since late last week, posting review after glowing review from all the gamer mags. After some initial head-scratching over the wisdom of changing the mapping from squares to hexes, pretty much everyone who has seen the game demos, played the betas, and play-tested for the reviews agrees that the latest version lives up to the series’s reputation. Having gone through this more than a few times with not just the previous iterations of Civ, but many other PC games where the anticipation was intense, I can predict that no matter how glowing the reviews, it will take less than 24 hours for a nearly equal amount of bitching and moaning to begin as people start to actually play the game and discover that it really isn’t the Holy Grail. One can only hope, though, that the complaints aren’t because of a slew of heretofore-unfound bugs that make the game difficult or impossible to play until the developers pull several all-nighters to rush out a first patch. I can live with disappointed fan screaming, but I don’t want to know that the Firaxis crew missed some giant showstopper bug.

I pre-ordered my copy of the game via Amazon several weeks ago, but now I’m debating canceling that order and downloading it online via Steam so that I don’t have to wait the extra 5-7 days for my game to ship. Here’s the thing: the initial release of the game is PC platform-only. That’s nothing new, and eventually the Mac version will drop, but that typically takes a couple of months or more. Not wanting to wait that long, I had decided when they announced the game that I would run BootCamp and partition my MacBook so that I could have a Windows boot partition to play the game. My MacBook’s specs meet the minimum requirements, so I’m pretty sure the game will run, if not in full-splendor mode. But I’ve been running into obstacles getting BootCamp to partition my drive, not to mention running into problems with getting a reliable WinXP installer. So, I *could* use the extra few days while a CD ships to work out the issues…or, I *could* fire up my big desktop tower that I don’t really use anymore and download the game via Steam and play it on that until the Mac version is released later on. Neither scenario is exactly ideal, but each has its upside, too. I have until midnight to figure it out, because Amazon should be shipping the CD promptly.

Hello, My Name Is Brian And I Am A Civ Addict

By Brian Filed in Life, Links, Misc Tagged with Civilization V, Life, Maynard March 9th, 2010 @ 12:12 pm

Yes, for the next 6-8 months you are going to have to deal with me periodically going all fanboi and frothing at the mouth about the upcoming release of Civilization V. Once it does hit the shelves, you will then have to deal with me complaining about all the bugs and poor gameplay issues until the first few patches and mods finally shape it into something playable, whereupon you will hear next to nothing from me while I spend countless hours playing One More Turn.

Here is the first of what will undoubtedly be many previews of the game as the developers start feeding the gaming websites with sneak peeks and propaganda designed to whet the appetites of the fanbase. While some of the changes in the game that are discussed in the article sound fascinating, I am a little concerned that the focus seems to be pushing the game further and further along the path of being a war simulation game and less into the multi-faceted “many ways to win” model that Civ IV pursued. But it’s clear from the article that the developers are still addressing gameplay issues and aren’t committed to the final form of the game yet.

True personal story: I began playing Civilization in 1996, when the Mac version of Civ II first hit the market. The day I brought the game home was also the very first full day we had Maynard, when he was a tinky-winky li’l kitten only a few weeks old. He was so little that we had to feed him kitten formula from a dropper, and I wasn’t entirely sure that he would survive, but he turned out to be a very tenacious little kitten. The first weekend I had the game, I stayed up all night playing it on my Mac Performa, checking in on the kitten, who needed to be fed every four hours. Mister Maynard is now a senior citizen kitteh of almost 14 years of age, and I am not sure that he will be with us by the time Civ V hits the shelf, but I was wrong about his chances as a baby, so maybe I’m being too pessimistic again now.

I Just Have Two Words To Share

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with Civilization V, Sid Meier, Sid Meier's Civilization February 23rd, 2010 @ 10:30 am

Civilization V

Tag Civilization V

Civilized

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