Sometimes we publish an article about a game for which I have no personal anecdotes with which to contextualize the piece. Jake Alley’s retrospective on Civilization is one such article.
I’m heading off to Capcom’s annual press event in Rome tomorrow, and I’ll be stopping in Boston along the way back to cover PAX East. If my updates seem a little spotty for the next week, it’s because I’m comatose from jetlag and sleep deprivation. I hear Italy has good coffee, though, so maybe that’ll help balance things out.
You know, it still weirds me the hell out that you’re not into turn-based strategy games, and Civ in particular, when you’re so into so many games which are so generally similar. I mean, you like FFT, where you’re taking turns moving dudes around on a big grid and messing with complex customization stuff in a branching fashion, making everything all balanced to handle whatever. You like Pikmin, which is an RTS that de-emphasizes combat in favor of resource hunting and reshaping the map. Mash those together and you get Civ.
I mean… is it the obtusity, where you kinda have to learn to play by trial and error and don’t know how good you’re doing until you’re winning or getting crushed? Is it the giant tech tree you need a poster of to properly plan things out? Is it the cold impersonal nature of all the nameless faceless drones you’re commanding? Have you just, for some reason, never had time to sit down with a Civ game and get into it? I am legitimately curious.
As the dude who just wrote a piece splitting the hairs between strategy and tactics games, you should see the difference in the game styles. I prefer to be a puppetmaster, not a conductor.
Aha. Mystery solved then!
Your second paragraph doesn’t exactly make the series sound appealing.
And the gelato. Trust me on this. Go to any gelato place, get the 4 euro cup with and a bunch of fruit flavors. Nothing in the States is a s good.
Do me a kindness and flip a table if you don’t hear any positive Mega Man-related game news while you’re at Capcom.
Ah, the greatest game.
that said, the article is awfully sparse =/
Huh. It’s almost as though you completely failed to comprehend the nature of this issue after several dozen posts of its contents have been posted over the course of nearly half a year.
bah. The needs for a ten thousand word paean to the glories of civilization outweigh anything so minor as ‘precedence’ or ‘thematic issues’.
Yeah, there’s kind of a lot of SNES games to talk about and a limit to how thick a book has to contain them. If it’s any consolation though, I’ve also got a crazy long rambling thing on Alpha Centauri just lying around:
http://www.kekkai.org/google/devilsadvocate/alpha-centauri.shtml
“I’m heading off to Capcom’s annual press event in Rome tomorrow, and I’ll be stopping in Boston along the way back to cover PAX East. If my updates seem a little spotty for the next week, it’s because I’m comatose from jetlag and sleep deprivation. I hear Italy has good coffee, though, so maybe that’ll help balance things out.”
I weep for your pain.
No Mario joke? Come ON.