Ten Forward

I've recently gotten back into the habit of playing Civilization IV rather obsessively until I drop from exhaustion. Which got me thinking back to a few conversations with Torie and others on that other site back in the day about computer gaming.

Since then Civilization V has been released and I never did get around to buying it. So I was wondering what the general opinion of potential other players around here might be regarding the latest Civilization offering. I heard a lot of complaints, but is there anyone who enjoyed it as much as or more than Civ IV?

Or are you all too busy playing Skyrim? (I haven't been able to buy it yet, myself.)

Any other games that are so good it's sacrilegious not to have or so bad that you want to talk about it?

I've got to warn you against Civ V. I don't necessarily mind hex tiles, but there were so many things broken, most of which probably stemmed from one-unit-per-tile -- but the worst of it all was that the game was tediously, mind-numbingly boring. Civ IV has lots of complex decisions, trade-offs, the three main driver resources (food, production, commerce) being partially cross-convertible, plus the derived resources (research and culture) plus the carefully balanced bonus resources; lots of interesting ways to win; in short lots of interesting distinctive strategic decisions that a player can make to achieve a variety of aims in a variety of different ways.

In Civ V, everything just comes down to food. I'd go on further, but it's best just to link you: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

Civ IV, however, is one of the richest strategy games I've played. It's a shame that V was such a dog.

Demetrios: I never played Civ I, but Civ III was seriously flawed. I didn't really get into it and it took a lot of convincing for me to try Civ IV. It was worth it, though. Civ IV also has a really fantastic tutorial system--one of the best of any PC games--so you don't need to study the manual, you learn by doing, and you do it slowly and naturally. Its two expansions (Warlords and Beyond the Sword) are, I believe, now integrated into the game, and they were great. It looks like Civ V was such a wipeout that now they're making Facebook games... that is so depressing.

I'm a big RPGer but mostly on the Xbox (except KOTOR).

What I love about the Sierra games like Zeus and Emperor is the attention to detail and all the little jokes. I like what the people say when you click on them--the workers might be working for the weekend, or one guy who pushes a cart remarks in Emperor that "the folks at the hemp farm are a bit odd, but they keep me well supplied, so I can't complain." There are also a lot of puns. The animations of the various buildings and such are just as entertaining. In Zeus, when you build a theater, you see a little guy with wings strapped to his back hanging from a winch spinning in circles out of control. The gladiators perform in the little arena slapping each other and so on and so forth. Civ does a great job with this, too--the sheep hop around and baa if you zoom in, the unit designs are unique for each empire, etc. I just love it when I feel like a game has been loved by the people who made it. I was so excited when they released Caesar IV, the latest Sierra citybuilding game, but it was actually worse than Civ V. The game was so buggy it was unplayable. I don't think I ever finished a game because of showstopping graphical glitches and crashes.

The first Assassin's Creed game is vaguely interesting to watch (it's definitely a cool concept and a really awesome setting), but gameplay is extremely boring and repetitive. I watched DT play it through and felt no impulse whatsoever to play it myself. The second one, however has become one of my all-time favorite games in history. It's up there with A Link to the Past and Civ IV. The story is fantastic, graphics are gorgeous, and gameplay is dynamic and scalable. I can't possibly recommend it enough. The next game, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, sticks with the character from AC2 and that was actually an even better game. I'm playing the fourth game in the franchise now (also the same character as 2), and I'm mostly liking it but it has some major flaws. If you're able to, get AC2. I love love love it.

I played so much Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2! That game was great, but I'm kind of over the whole random encounter thing. After playing Tales of Vesperia (fantastic game), which has a dynamic, real-time combat system, I don't think I can go back to turn-based combat, either.

Does Civ IV still support that idiotic GameSpy multiplayer network? Because I'd love to play a game with you sometime!

I'm like bobsandiego, I only don't play Civ because each iteration I've played has become an addiction serious enough that I had to delete it.

I'm now trying to decide whether my addiction to Hearts of Iron III (which is basically Europa Universalis 3, set in World War II, and with a billion tech trees) ETA, stupid sentence fragments: is becoming a problem. The learning curve is practically asymptotic, but once you get past it, if you do, it's a lot of fun. Well, "fun", in the sense that simulating a conflict that killed untold millions of people in horrible ways is "fun". But I was a wargamer from the moment my father (bless that man, FSM) gave me a copy of <i>War at Sea</i> when I was 10. :D

I really wish I could sell Assassin's Creed one and use the proceeds to buy the second one now. After that recommendation, I totally want to play it.

The attention to detail you describe, Torie, sounds a little bit like what they did with Thief (as Demetrios mentioned). I've only played the first of that game and a few minutes of the third one but it used to be when you snuck up on a guard you'd hear him mumbling to himself about how bored he is with standing alone in the dark and the cold. Or if you moved too fast and made a sound he'd say, "Whazzat?" and start looking around for you. It was awesome. I've got Thief 3 but it's a little too old for my computer and I haven't gotten around to figuring out how to slow it down enough to be playable.

But (and I forgot to mention this yesterday) I'd love to see what they might do with a Thief IV.

Anyway, I'm fairly bored with the random encounter thing too but I still like turn based combat. Mainly because I'm starting to get kind of old and my reflexes just aren't what they used to be.

Somehow I've never heard of Hearts of Iron but now I'm intrigued. I might have to go looking for that.

By the way (and man, am I bouncing around in topics today) I loved A Link to the Past too. That was such an awesome game. So now I really ought to get AC2 since we seem to have such similar tastes. I almost bought a PS2 just for Dragon Quest VIII but never did. Now I kind of want to. And I also have a desire to try to conquer all of France.

So much to do and so little time to do it in...

By the way, I have no idea if Civ IV supports GameSpy's network or not. I'll have to check that out because it would be fun to play, although I'm a little worried that I'd be nowhere as good as you guys are and totally embarrass myself. :)

Oh, and AC2 on the PC is only $10 on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Creed-2-Pc/dp/B001TOQ8R0/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1323982585&sr=8-3

(The hundreds of negative reviews, btw, are because of Ubisoft's draconian DRM--not the game. I played it on the xbox so I didn't have to deal with the DRM.)

I thought Arkham Asylum did a great job as a stealth game--most of the time. It actually said, okay, so you're Batman. You don't have armor. You can win a fistfight, but if someone shoots you, you're dead. So you either have to sneak undetected, or take out guys one at a time stealthily, and you have to be smart about taking out the guys with guns and weapons first. Of course, the boss fights were all pretty stupid...

I was skeptical about the Xbox (I really loved the PS2), but I can honestly say it's one of the best gaming platforms ever. I'm going to be really sad when they finally retire it.

I did some research and it looks like Steam will NOT let you register your hard-copy CD version of the game. You have to buy it again, which, sigh, I love this game, but $30?!?! The game is almost seven years old!! I barely paid that much when it was new! Do you not have the PC version? Maybe I'll wait for a Steam sale. I hate paying twice for something...

Arkham City is not good. Don't even bother.

Microsoft claims they will be supporting the Xbox through 2015 at least, so I think it's got a few more good years left. They seem really invested in advancing the Kinect, which I do not have but am interested in, mostly for fitness games. I don't and have never seen the appeal of waving your arms about trying to speak slowly to a machine as a main method of control, though. I'm a little crotchety about some technology. I dislike touch screens, too. But the flailing stuff reminds me too much of voice menus that companies use for customer support phone lines, where you say "REPRESENTATIVE!!!!!" a thousand times and it thinks you're trying to pay a bill before abruptly hanging up.

@toryx
Believe me, conquering all of France loses its thrill a bit when you realize you have to conquer the whole country a good three or four times in order to annex it all. You'd think by the third time in thirty years the Turks have sacked Paris, the provinces would be willing to capitulate...

Regarding Civ 4, it's totally possible to play games including both Steam & non-Steam users. The options are:

- Direct IP connection game: we've had some trouble in the past, but this may be a viable option. I think the big issue is that Torie and I are both on the same LAN, so it's difficult to connect without confusing the router. (Why this should be hard, I have no idea...)
- Private-party VPN software: Hamachi used to be the go-to for this, but it looks like they got bought out by LogMeIn and are no longer free. There may be some other alternatives -- something called Comodo, Wippien, and something else called Tunngle. We haven't done too much research yet, but of these Wippien seems to be the most promising... for the others, it looks like the usual rule applies: if you aren't paying, you're probably the product :)

Man, this will be fun. I haven't had a good Civ IV network party in a while :)

Demetrios: I have no clue why those reviews say as such. Now full disclosure is that I didn't play the game, my roommate did, but I watched her play through the entire plot and it's just inferior in every way. For one, it gets Batman all wrong. Where in the last game he's smart, stealthy, and clever, here he's stupid, obvious, and practically a sociopath. Granted that this is a moral (rather than gameplay) issue I have, but one of the things that makes Batman who he is is the fact that he won't kill people, right? Well, the game ratcheted up the non-lethal violence to a degree I could not have imagined. You often interrogate people who beg you "I'll tell you everything, don't hurt me!" And Batman responds, "Of course you will," before beating the snot out of them. Graphically. He just surrendered! I found it rather disturbing, actually, how brutal and senselessly cruel he is.

And the beatings continue. You don't sneak into rooms anymore--you just punch everyone in the face. It feels like an entirely different game dressed up as Batman. The puzzles aren't challenging in an intellectual way. Instead they're extremely complicated hand-eye coordination challenges. I watched the roommie attempt to get a Riddler trophy for like 45 minutes. Because it was all about stepping on these blocks in sequence. It's not that you don't know what to do, it's that you seriously can't make Batman do it. The controls were all wonky and overly complicated. Batman can't jump! And there was way too much controller jockeying trying to do extremely specific things.

Then there's the plot, which makes no sense. My apartment had three people watching this game and none of us could figure out what was going on. Even by the end. And it's not because they're a bunch of comic in-jokes, as the roommie knows waaaay more about comics than I ever will. The main plot is actually really short, too--the rest of the game is taken up by over 400 Riddler trophies (seriously. four. hundred.). I love sidequests and I love collecting crap, as long as you can see a light at the end of the tunnel. It's clear they just didn't have much of a game and they didn't really think about it.

Lastly: it's rape-y. I don't know if this was an attempt to make the game "grittier" and "edgier," but all of the bad guys huddle up to talk about how much they want to rape Harley Quinn (whose character design has been reworked to incorporate 200% more slut), and how if she didn't have that pesky Joker around protecting her, they would ALL be tapping that. When you play the Catwoman missions the guards are even worse--they constantly refer to you as "that cat-bitch" (animal fail?) and talk about how hot you are. It's... very uncomfortable.

It looks like Thief is less than $10 on Amazon, so maybe I'll pick it up!

Demetrios: I have a hard time believing that any gaming magazines are more sexist than American ones. My absolute favorite issue of GameInformer (which, by the way, had a staff of 30 and no women until about a year ago when they added a marketing chick) was an "examination" of why there aren't more women protagonists in games. Various designers hemmed and hawed about how hard it is to design women, I mean they have all these boobies and whatnot! But the best was the guy who created Gears of War (or Metal Gear Solid? Or Medal of Honor? I get them all confused...) explaining that there are no women soldiers in his games because women have the most important job in the war: making babies that will grow up to be more soldiers.

Seriously.

Anyway, I get the Frank Miller vibe but it doesn't match the last game at all, where he's violent without being senselessly cruel. (It's particularly incongruous with the ancillary cover art, which for some reason is designed like a romantic comedy movie poster.)

Yeah, okay, I'm dropping Arkham City from my to-buy list. That business with the rape-y aspect would just piss me off. I have no desire to support that kind of storytelling.

But the best was the guy who created Gears of War (or Metal Gear Solid? Or Medal of Honor? I get them all confused...) explaining that there are no women soldiers in his games because women have the most important job in the war: making babies that will grow up to be more soldiers.

Jesus, I hate people sometimes.

Anyway...

I've been intrigued by the Kinect fitness stuff. I bought and used a ton of the Wii fitness programs and quite enjoyed them for a while but there are some of the things with the remote that are so reliable that it can get too frustrating. I was thinking that if the Kinect solved a lot of those problems, I might be that much more interested. Of course, the other question is whether or not my living room is actually large enough for it to work well.

bobsandiego: Man, I loved Masters of Orion back in the day. That was another that I spent way too many hours playing in the wee hours of the night.

Deepthought: It sounds like an online game may well be a reality then! Now we just need to find the time. Boy I sure wish I still worked at a place that gave me the whole week between Christmas and New Years off.

Beating up hookers and running over ambulances is totally okay in that world!

Totally - but my point is, you almost never HAVE to do those things. In fact, there was one guy who made a really cool series of blog posts about playing GTAIV with the fewest possible killings of ANYONE. I think he got away with two where he had to directly kill someone. All the other game goals could be accomplished by either at worst indirect (car accidents, explosions) means or by not killing anyone. Very cool experiment.

Anyway, I admit my adoration for the game is out of character and odd.

I'm not really a fan of zombies at all, so I'm not all that jazzed about playing a game based on them, unfortunately - people have recommended the Fallout series as well, but I have similar concerns. Playing Uncharted was really cool for me, until those horrible things came along, and then it was creepy and...unpleasant, for me. Red Dead was good for it too, with the Grand Theft Horsey approach, and again had some different and interesting side quests: hunting skills, foraging skills, stealth, there were a lot of interesting things about those two as well.

Maybe it's just the way I play them? I dunno. I don't really defend it as a...well, a defensible thing. Love is a mystery. ;)

I blame all of you. I just want that out there. LOL
grrr CIV IV now resides on my iMac and I spent like 4 hours playing it last night. I'm going to have to re-learn some self-control.

I think I could free up a few hours on Saturday or Monday. (With my current arthritis flare its unlikely we'll be going to the zoo anyway.)
I suspect I'll get crushed and you two will do a supirority dance. LOL

Toryx: but there's nothing like bombing pikemen from the air! :)

Evil= civilzations other than me. :D
By they way I can start early for me say about 8:30 so about 11:30 on your distorted time frame.

Oh, and toryx, I can give you your tribbles in person!

Toryx: D'oh! For some reason I thought you were talking about meeting up this weekend. Next weekend is fairly open. I'll be busy Friday but I'm free Saturday and Sunday (Monday I have to work anyway). We live in Harlem but we're better off meeting downtown somewhere. As someone with a distinct homebody persuasion I am not familiar with bars or whatever else the cool kids are up to... I guess I could Google it. That's hip, right?

Re Civ IV: Tomorrow I'm free in the morning (9am is fine) until about 1pm. Monday I'm free in the morning until maybe 4pm. Shall I send you guys an e-mail so we can schedule off the boards?

Torie: Yeah, I thought you might have gotten the weekends mixed up. It would have been pretty funny, though, to be playing Civ IV with you all while I was just a handful of miles away.

Anyway, Saturday the 31st should work great to meet somewhere. I'm not overly familiar with the bars in the city these days either. To make it easier for you both, we could try and meet somewhere on the upper west side. I'm a little more familiar with that part of the city and I know there are a bunch of decent places off of Amsterdam north of 72nd for the Columbia crowd.

Civ IV: It probably would be a good idea to move scheduling to email. freetoryx at gmail is the email you can use initially.

Well I got Skyrim for Christmas. And Steam is having another week of crazy sales which led me to buy KoTOR for a whole $2.50. I think I'm going to be buying Assassin's Creed II from Amazon for $10. And I ended up installing the expansions to Civ IV so that I can play that too.

The only question is, when am I going to have time to play these games?

Aargh, and I'm sorry to see I'll miss meeting up with you while you're in NYC!

Toryx: In this case, I won't be around because I'm going to a wedding in Florida on New Year's Eve! But I hope to catch you next time.

I pretty much wanted a Wii for Super Mario Galaxy, and that and New Super Mario Bros Wii are still my favorites. I also love House of the Dead Overkill and some of the downloadable games, like Mega Man 9 (which is also available on Xbox Arcade). Judging from my wife's progress in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, I will also love that.

The problem, of course, is that I don't prioritize games over nearly anything else, so it always takes me a while to finish games. I'm in the middle of Okami, which is terrific, and I have started and loved Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands (way different from the Xbox version), Epic Mickey, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Lost in Shadow. I have many more unplayed and unopened games waiting for me to get to them, on multiple systems. If you like Street Fighter games and anime, I'd recommend Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. And Super Mario Kart Wii is as fun as any game in that series.

I just wanted to note for posterity that I had a truly fabulous time with toryx! I hope to meet the rest of you at some point...

Bob, Toryx, DeepThought and I have all started a Civ IV game, so if anyone else wants to hop in just drop me a line.

Anyone playing Skyrim and/or The Old Republic?

Overheard from my sweetie-wife last night "You never going to get anything written if you keep playing that game."
*sigh* The dreaded siren call of Civ IV. LUckily I did put the game aside and did real work, but boy it was tough.
LOL