Tag Archives: Civilization

My Steam Replay for 2023… Plus My XBox 2023 Stats

Playing the Different Generations of Civilization Today

Having written a bit about Sid Meier’s Civilization and its various versions over the last 30 years earlier this week, I was kind of interested to have some sort of brief reminder/comparison of the different generations.

A couple of weeks ago I was all up about the idea that you could play every generation of the Diablo series, would Civilization follow suit?

So I started going down the list… not in order, because chaos is my thing… but I will report them out in order from newest to oldest.

Civilization VI – 2016

This is the current version. It is on Steam. You can buy it and play it right now, it gets updates regularly, it has a bunch of DLC (19 that I see) that I have not purchased, it has a game pass of some sort because that is what AAA games get these days, and you can earn Steam achievements playing it. It is also part of the Steam Workshop ecosystem for mods and such.

Civilization VI

While it probably runs better on my current machine than it did on the one I had when it launched, it is also 16+ GB to download. That isn’t a huge amount in this day and age, but it is more that I was willing to invest in going back to play it. If we got the one-time “strategy group” back together for Friday night games or some such I would grab it. But for just me to play for maybe 2 hours… not so much.

I suppose, as a side question, is any of the DLC worthwhile? Does it improve the game? My impressions are all from the base game, which was unexciting enough… I am really not interested in how my cities look as long as they are producing units for war as an example… that I went back to Civ V.

Ability to play today: 100%

Civilization: Beyond Earth – 2014

I didn’t download this one. I wrote about it previously. We tried it as a group. It didn’t really stick with me, feeling like a watered down Alpha Centauri mixed in with the almost maniacal love of unnecessary graphical detail that tends to grip the series.

Civilization Beyond Earth

That said, it is there on Steam, available for purchase and download, it has some DLC to buy as well, and the base install looks to be about 6GB.

Ability to play today: 100%

Civilization V – 2010

The first title in the series to launch on Steam, and it required Steam in order to play. It was the reason I went back to Steam after Valve screwed up my original account during the Half-Life 2 retail code fiasco. And, of course, it too had a problematic launch. Like most Civilization titles it barely ran on my system back in 2010 and crashed a lot. There is a reason that auto-save has been a feature of the game since Civilization II.

The new game experience, Civ version

It is still there and playable, though it can be a bit problematic. I had to re-download it because the copy I had on my drive, last played in 2019, simply refused to launch. A re-install fixed the issue and I was able to play. It runs at a sprightly pace now, the computer opponents being very quick until you get into deep late-game with tons of units on the field. I was able to get through a medium size game in an afternoon and evening.

The base game is generally available for cheap during any sale. There are two expansions about which I am less than thrilled. They are okay, but like a lot of Civ expansions they completely changed how the game felt. There is also a ton of Steam Workshop mods and scenarios for the game.

Overall, a solid if somewhat divisive entry in the series. It is, as noted, a title I have spent a lot of time with, it has Steam achievements, scenarios, and the things that make Civ fun.

Maybe my second favorite version of the game, interesting choices, the end of massive unit stacking, though still prone to some quirks and not as fast as I would expect a title this old to be.

Ability to play today: 95%

Civilization IV – 2005

We are now in the pre-Steam era, though I recall I bought my copy online and downloaded it over what passed for the internet back then, some flavor of ADSL.

I think my main bias against this version is that at launch it ran VERY slowly on my system and was part of the three game generation that insisted on being full screen and would crash when I tried to alt-tab out to look something up. I wrote to their support about the issue and they told me I shouldn’t tab out of the game. That was helpful. They did eventually add a windowed mode, which has been a part of the series ever since. At least that is my memory of events. Maybe it was always there and I missed it back in the day.

My memories of it are also of a much more complicated game than previous versions… doesn’t that apply to every title in the sequence… but today it seems oddly light and sparse. Plays fast and smooth… more so that Civ V I would say. It also looks fairly good; the UI doesn’t look like it was from Windows 3.1, Oh, and actually supports the Steam overlay so you can take screen shots, though there are no achievements.

There is also some DLC for it on Steam. I only have the base game, so my quick replay used that.

Civ IV DLC

Over all, rock solid. Would recommend.

It is available on Steam in bits and pieces, or as a complete edition with all DLC for a much cheaper price over at GoG.com.

Ability to play today: 100%

Civilization III – 2001

In my brain Civ III is always “the new one” despite it now being more than 20 years old. At launch, aside from being slow and demanding full screen, it seemed so much more complicated and busy and a lot of the wonders from Civ II which were game breaking in their power at times felt a bit diminished. It also seemed so shiny and new.

Get it all on Steam

Today a lot of the UI feels really dated… not bad, but much closer to the earlier games in view an concept… and it has to be played full screen at a resolution that means all the open windows in the background will be completely messed up. It also took a few tries to get it to launch and it crashed out to desktop… a completely resized and reorganized desktop because of screen resolution, something I will never stop complaining about… so once again we’re reminded why auto-save is a default option in the series.

That said, it plays pretty well. It looks a bit it raw, but my current CPU meant that processing computer players during their turns was no big deal, so things went along quickly.

I had forgotten that this version was the start crazy stacking era. In Civ II if you stacked units and one died, they all died. In Civ III your optimum attack mode was a mega stack of units that the enemy could peel back one by one, but not before you took their city.

Still a good game, I like a lot of the mechanics. The graphical choices feel dated now however, especially UI elements, and it is prone to crashes on my system. It is available on Steam and at GoG.com.

Ability to play today: 90%

Alpha Centauri – 1999

I had a short (in retrospect), but hard core addition to this title. It introduced a series of features, like boarders that I really liked. I wasn’t completely keen on the magenta heavy landscape setting, and it was the first of the full screen versions of the game and is locked in a 1024×768 resolution.

But it is available over at GoG.com in the Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack, which includes the base game and the expansion. After some big downloads above, this rings in at a little over half a GB, so pretty quick to get at broadband speeds.

The game plays well and has that ethereal other planet feeling.

Down on the planet

The main problem for me is that, as with Civ III, the full screen resolution lock will screw up every other window you have open. It is also a bit unhappy about tabbing in and out. Having a second monitor helped me a bit.

But otherwise, seemed pretty solid. I did not play as much of this as some of the other titles, but it moved fast and was still good. If you can put up with the fact it only runs full screen at 1024×768, this is still a very viable title. If you get annoyed by the full screen business like I do, then it is less of a choice.

Ability to play today: 80%

Civilization II – 1996

Now we’re into the MicroProse era, where there is no support and a lot of uncertainty over whether this now qualifies as abandonware or if there somebody out there who will sue your ass if somebody like GoG tries to patch up a copy to work on today’s machines.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of this game more than 25 years down the road was that they bought fully into the Microsoft Foundation Class UI, which means it ALWAYS runs in a window that can be resized to fill your screen. So it filled my 800×600 screen back then and it fills my 3440×1440 screen today, which is awesome. Part of my resentment against the next three titles in the series is their strict adherence to the full screen mode at resolutions that seem tiny by today’s standards

A whole lotta Civ II on that screen

Granted, on my current screen the units are so tiny I need to play with my glasses on, but I need to do most things, including write, with my computer glasses on.

Getting it to run however… hrmmm. First, you need a copy of Civilization II Multiplayer Gold, which has a 32-bit executable. The previous versions were 16-bit and Windows gave up support for that when it went all in on 64-bit back with Windows 7. Then you need to find the patcher that somebody did ages ago that fixes an issue that will keep it from launching (which I have squirreled away). And you need to have the CD mounted because that was its copy protection. I am sure there is a way to get around that, but I have an optical drive in my current machine still, so I just insert the disk… if I can find it. (And when I can’t find it, I have an image of the disk on my drive and some cheap software to mount it in memory.)

All of that said, if you can get it up and running, this game plays great. It is still a huge achievement and honestly feels less dated than Civ III does. I cannot overstate how good this game still feels. Because of the UI framework choices a lot of things scale and look good even at a screen resolution nobody would have guessed at back in 1996.

This just looks so much better than Civ III pop ups

And, of all the titles I played since last weekend, this is the one that got me stuck in “just one more turn” mode, in part because the game plays so well and is so familiar to me, but also because it runs so damn fast.

Really, I wish somebody like GoG.com could take this on, because it really only needs a couple of modest fixes and it runs like a champ. I would overpay for this.

Ability to play today: 10%

Civilization – 1991

I thought surely I was done for here. The original 1991 Civilization, it pre-dates stainless steel, so you can’t get it wet. I mean, there are not a lot of 30 year old video games that run, certainly not many which come up and ask me which of the then current video standards my system supports as an opening step.

Oh yeah, that era

I actually played the Mac version, which had slightly tuned up graphics, since back then color Macs could do 16-bit color by default.

Anyway, I was going to despair because Microsoft even has a service bulletin specifically about this game declaring it will not run on any 64-bit operating systems. I thought I was going to have to play a bit of FreeCiv, which has modes for Civ, Civ II, and Civ III rule sets.

I was not looking forward to that because, while I hate to dump on fan made passion projects like this, when I have tried to play it in the past I have found it to be an unsatisfying experience, where the UI conventions get in the way of the fun.

But the game itself has fallen into the abandonware side of the house and you can find web sites that host it so you can play in a browser.

I went and played it at Classic Reload, which didn’t trigger any virus or trojan warnings.

Civilization calling from 1991

Playing in a browser is a bit annoying. It is certainly far from the ideal experience. But, even with that hindering play, I have to say that the original title is still a very good game.

I mean, I knew that at some level intellectually. It had to be good to have set off a 30 year series of games. But sometimes the old versions of a game don’t live up to your memories. That is not the case here. The original Civilization would be kind of a strong title if it came out today with some update graphics and such.

I would certainly spend $10 on it if GoG.com could spiff it up and get it running at reasonable resolutions on my current machine. Otherwise you have to scrounge a CD from somewhere… wait, no, this was on floppy disks. Even I don’t have a 3.5″ floppy drive anymore. Good luck there.

Ability to play today: 70%

Conclusions

I think the big, obvious revelation here is that there is a reason that they are making a Civilization VII; this has been a very strong series of games over the last 30 years. I am still annoyed by some of the design choices the team has made over the years, full screen being the worst transgression on my list, but the core of the series has been pretty much carried forward for three decades.

I also feel very much renewed on my fan boy devotion to Civilization II. But I have some renewed respect for Civ III and Civ IV and have been reminded how strong the original was.

The whole series isn’t as playable today as the Diablo series is. However, everything after Civ II is available in some supported form from a service is you feel the need to go back in time.

And I am now a bit into the whole Civ thing, so we’ll have to see which one I end up playing the most this month. Aside from the web version of Civilization, ManicTime records them all correctly with a recognizable name. (Which puts them ahead of EVE Online, which shows up as “exefile” in ManicTime now.)

But what if you have never played Civ and wanted to start today?

Civ VI is the latest version, so that has the focus and is probably a safe choice.

But if you want something at a bit of a discount or do not have a high end machine by today’s standards, both Civ IV and Civ V are excellent options. Both feel reasonably up to date. Civ IV is the end of the stacked unit juggernaut era and feels like the last title in its generation, while Civ V changed up the play style enough to be something of a divisive entry in the series for a while, but represents the path forward that the franchise has taken. And Civ V also has easy access to mods on Steam, something built in from day one.

Or there is always original Civilization in a browser for old school fun.

Honest Game Trailers takes on Civilization

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Honest Game Trailers showed up last week with an episode I could not resist. I have been playing Civilization as long as the series has been a thing, which is past the 30 year mark now.

The core games in the franchise are, in my opinion:

1991 – Civilization
1996 – Civilization II
1999 – Alpha Centauri
2001 – Civilization III
2005 – Civilization IV
2010 – Civilization V
2014 – Civilization: Beyond Earth
2016 – Civilization VI

I am not interested in the console spin-offs, the mobile titles, and that horrible experiment on Facebook. (That was omitted from the list of games in the franchise.) And, while it doesn’t carry the name, Alpha Centauri was really Civilization 2.5 in my book, so it counts.

The video itself is… kind of bland.

I mean, it gets into some of the absurdities of the game. Everybody who has played long enough has a tyrant warlord Gandhi story. And they at least alluded to the “one more turn” thing and how the first hundred turns are often much more fun than the micro management of the mid-game.

The flat world of original Civilization

But they really left off on a couple of key aspects of the franchise. The first is that, at launch, every version of the game has been way too much for the current generation of CPUs. My memories of Civ through to Civ V is my games taking less time with every computer upgrade as the AI opponent would speed up noticeably.

And the second, of course, is which version of the game is the best, a topic that can lead to virtual fist fights between friends.

My ranking, because of course I have one, based solely on time played as an indicator of quality, is:

Civilization II
Civilization V
Alpha Centauri
Civilization
Civilization III
Civilization IV
Civilization VI
Civilization: Beyond Earth

I have some strong feelings about different versions and their features. Civilization VI, for example, never stuck with me and I still go back to Civ V if I want to play these days. Meanwhile, the less said about Beyond Earth, a mere shadow of Alpha Centauri, the better.

Finally, there is the argument over which is the best 4X strategy game. Even back in the 90s I would get into it with the whole Civilization versus Masters of Orion argument, with the Reach for the Stars voices chiming in from the sidelines. There have been a lot of titles over the years. The list on Wikipedia brings back some memories with titles like Spaceward Ho!

But has anybody really done 4X better than the Civilization series?

And just to finish this off I am going to go into the horrible block editor just to try and put a poll into this post to let people rage vote on their favorite in the series.

Which version will top the list?

(You must visit the site to vote and various ad blockers may hide the poll, so your mileage may vary considerably.)

Fiddling with FreeCiv

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As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I was digging around for possible things to play for a bit earlier this month, and one path I went down for a few days was FreeCiv.

FreeCiv simple start screen

I was actually thinking about getting out Civilzation II yet again… I have the disk on my bookshelf, so I know I can get it running again… but then I thought about FreeCiv, which is an open source project and no doubt up to date and compatible with 64-bit operating systems and large screen monitors and all of the usual pitfalls that come with trying to play older titles.

FreeCiv has been around for more than 25 years at this point, having started off as a way to make a version of the original Civilization that supported network multiplayer gaming. Big stuff back in 1996.

The Civilization II came and that got looped into the project and then Civilization III and then other ideas were melded into the project and… well, more than 25 years down the road this is an engine that does a crazy amount of things.

Just starting the game gives you a first glimpse into the options available.

Starting a game…

And that doesn’t even get into the breadth of network play options captured in a single entry on that list.

You have to read the manual that comes in the install package, or go to the wiki, to start getting a handle on what the options mean.

Also, given the time this project has been alive, it is probably no surprise that there are also a myriad of nation options to choose from, each with a long list of city names and possible leaders.

50 in the core choices, 555 in the extended

So you make your choices… you can play traditional Civ style, with top down squares, Civ II style with the 2.5D isometric view with squares so popular in the 80s and 90s, or you can have Civ III hexes and boarders with Civ II rules in an interesting mix, or one of the other options… I favor that Civ II Civ III mix currently… and you end up in a game that looks like the start of any Civilization game really, which is what one should expect.

You’ve probably seen a situation like this before

As I noted, it is up to date in a lot of way and can, for example, expand to use all the real estate that my 34″ monitor has to offer. It plays like the early Civ titles for the most part. They key commands are mostly the same. And it looks decent enough, with its own home grown tile set and units that are different from the original games but similar enough to not take too much guess work to figure out.

How it plays though… well, you have to get used to it. Any open source project will end up with the “good enough” issue or compromises in UI to be able to support things as widely as possible. You can play on Linux as well, which means the UI has to stay at a somewhat primitive level of development when it comes to giving feedback to the user.

The first stumble for me is getting used to shift-enter to end a turn, rather than having to mouse around to find the end turn button on the left side info bar. But you get over that pretty quickly.

The UI though, the flip side of it being happy to use up all my screen real estate is that it outputs the information you need in tiny text in windows and tabs that appear at the lower edge of the window, which is easy glance past on a large screen monitor.

Little tabs showing up at the bottom of the screen

Now, before you point it out, those text tabs look pretty substantial in that screen shot, but only because I made the game window a manageable size (~1500 x 1100) rather than the full native size of my monitor (3440 x 1440) just to keep the screen shot from being enormous and completely illegible when scaled down to 600 pixels wide to fit into the column width of the blog.

Nothing like finding that somebody has started attacking you because you missed the Diplomacy alert in blue (it should be flashing red) or realizing you’re not researching anything because you missed the Research alert showing up (should be double flashing red), but then you see if pop up and it is just telling you that it finished something in your queue with the same quite level of assertion.

My immediate solution has been to play at a much smaller resolution in order to not miss so many notifications.

But most of the annoyance is just figuring out how to read some of the windows. The research screen is interesting and convenient because it allowed you to queue up your research goals… but then reading what is in the actual queue isn’t exactly clear to me. And there are several windows where you can do things in the wrong order and the games just lets you and moves on because you didn’t, in effect, say “please” to get what you wanted.

Basically, it is the confluence of a very deep game with a lot of features, a mid level “good enough” UI, and having grown used to the Civ series putting up a modal alert that you can’t ignore or move forward past without at least acknowledging the event in question.

The UI thing is pretty much an object lesson in how much UI design impacts playability and why it is an important aspect of any game. Here we have a title that is rich and deep in features but which often left me stumbling around trying to figure out things that have been simple in similar commercial titles.

None of which is insurmountable. But it definitely feels like a game you don’t play casually. It is more a game you need to invest in, one that becomes a hobby or a regular group activity with friends.

Which, again, isn’t a bad thing. And it is hard to argue with the price.

Where is the Scenario Mod for This?

Due to the absolutely staggering lack of leadership currently at the federal level, regional groupings have begun to form in an effort to coordinate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The internet being what it is, people are tracking and mapping these groupings.

Regional Groupings

There are even people working on flag variations for things like the Western States Pact. (Though, now that there are five states in it, the flag needs a re-think.)

And, because I am what I am, my thoughts immediately go towards a mod or scenario or whatever to reflect this, if not break up, then regional grouping of these re-United States. Civilization or Crusader Kings or Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis, in one or all of these somebody has to be brewing up a scenario. Who has one?

To the Series Born

There is a bit of a topic trend going on for Blapril, started by Krikket, where people name their top four or five favorite video game series.

The Blapril commeth

This is week four, which has its own topic, but since I haven’t come up with anything else I took “series appreciation” as falling under the “developer/creator appreciation” umbrella and decided I should run with it.

~~March 29th – April 4th – Blapril Prep Week~~
~~April 5th – April 11th – Topic Brainstorming Week~~
~~April 12th – April 18th – Getting to Know You Week~~
April 19th – April 25th – Developer/Creator Appreciation Week
April 26th – May 2nd – Staying Motivated Week
May 3rd – May 9th – Lessons Learned Week

Looking at video game series seems pretty reasonable. In the last decade or so especially the large video game publishers have gone all in on series and sequels for games, eschewing much new in favor of a reliable return on investment that churning out annual change ups on standard formula has proven to bring.

So I started thinking about which series I might put on a list… and I sort of ran into a bit of a wall. This is different than, say, picking my 15 most influential games.

Part of that was I immediately put bounds around the possible answers. It is just what I do out of habit. First, to my mind, a “series” requires there to be three or more games. So as much as I may have enjoyed Defense Grid and Defense Grid 2, they are only a game and its sequel and not really a series. And that along knocks off a lot of possible entries listed over on Wikipedia.

I also felt that unless I had played a substantial and representative number of titles in a series… arbitrarily I figured I needed at least half to cover… I couldn’t really count that series as a favorite. Playing only Need for Speed: World or Dirt 3 does not really give me enough to make a claim on either series. I can say I love Mario Kart, but I only ever played Mario Kart 64, Double Dash, and that version on the DS. I never even bought the Wii version! Can I really complain about the blue shell if that is all I have experienced?

Likewise, although I had played four of the nine games in the Ultima series, those were the first four games of a series that expanded quite a bit from humble origins. I enjoyed Ultima III the best out of what I played, which probably means I am not down with the series as a whole.

I did wonder for a bit if MMORPG expansions ought to count. Is EverQuest one game, or a series of 27 games churned out over 21 years? But I decided that way lay madness and discarded the idea. (Also, how many expansions would I have had to have played to be legit in counting EverQuest? More than I have I am sure.)

This would have been much easier if I had been a big console gamer. Or a sports focused gamer. There are so many series there. But as an online and/or MMO gamer, series haven’t been a huge thing for me and, as I have noted here in the past, I have been playing online games since 1986.

So what series of games had I played enough of to meet my own criteria?

Cilivization – This series of games came up on a some lists and I am good here. I have owned I-VI and a couple of the side games in the series, like Alpha Centauri. I played the hell out of the original, the first sequel, and the fifth entry, along with Alpha Centauri.

Pokemon – Or at least the main line Pokemon RPG titles. I think I am covered on that, having played every title on the DS/3DS handheld series as well as Pokemon Sword on the Switch. I even played two of the GameBoy Advance titled back on my original DS Lite, because it had the GBA cartridge slot. And I played the re-release of Pokemon Blue on the 3DS and have the blog post to prove it. I’ve even played Pokemon Ranger and a couple of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon titles.

Age of Empires – The RTS winner here, though of the three core games I was only really a fan of Age of Empires II – The Age of Kings. That was the pinnacle of the series to my mind, though I owned and played all three. The original was a bit rough and unbalanced and the third seemed like Ensemble had lost its way. But I have Age of Empires II in my Steam library.

Diablo – There are three games there, so meets the bar for a series and I have owned and played all three games plus their expansions… multiple copies of a the first two even. I owned a copy of Diablo II and the expansion for both home and work because we could play games on the work network after hours back around the turn of the century. Those days are long gone, but if Blizzard made a credible Diablo II remaster I would throw money at my computer screen.

LEGO Star Wars – I thought I was done when I hit four series, and then this run of games finally popped up into my conscious thought. There are six titles and we own four of them… more if you count the combo edition that reworked and repacked the first two games when Traveler’s Tales got the vibe right on the series.

And that’s it.

By my own criteria I cannot really come up any more, though at least I made it to five. I can declare these as my five favorite series by virtue of being the only five. I imagine if I rack my brain I can probably shake out one or two more… but it would be stuff from the 90s, things long forgotten.

Oddly, I have the games listed in the order to which the series came to mind, which corresponds roughly to a the descending order for both how much time I have spent playing them AND how I would probably rank them. Seems natural enough.

Others who have posted their lists, some of whom felt less self-constrained than I:

Picking My 15 Most Influential Games

Jackie at Kitty Kitty Boom Boom, prompted by lvling life, put up a list of her top 15 video games.

There was a methodology by which you were supposed to generate that list. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. You were not supposed to spend a lot of time with it. And, of course, I tossed that aside. Rather than a quick list of 15 special games, I ended up with my list of the 15 most influential video games in my gaming career so far.

And what do I mean by “influential?”

I mean that they opened up new idea, new genres, or new points of view for me when it came to video games.

Influential does not mean that they were my favorites, the games I played the most in a given genre, or even all that good in a few cases. So, for example, I have played a LOT more World of Warcraft than EverQuest at this point in my life, and I am not really all that keen to go back to EverQuest. But EverQuest is the more influential of the two. Without it, there would be no WoW, and without me playing it in 1999, I might not have made it to WoW.

Anyway, on to the list.

1. Star Trek (1971) – many platforms

Star Trek in vt52

I have covered this as the first computer video game I ever played. While incredibly simple, this game showed me the way, let me know that computers were going to be an entertainment device

2. Tank (1974) – Arcade

Tank! In Black and white!

This was the game AFTER Pong. Not that Pong was bad. Pong was new and fresh when it came out, but I must admit that it did become a little dull after the first pass or two. And then Tank showed us that man need not entertain himself with virtual paddles alone. I wouldn’t touch Pong after a while, but Tank was always good. You just needed somebody to play with.

3. Adventure (1979) – Atari 2600

This Castle is Timeless!

Yes, I got that Atari 2600 for Christmas way back when, but then there was a matter of what to play. It came with the Combat cartridge, which included Tank. And I also had Air-Sea Battle and a few others. But the problem was that these games were all unfulfilling unless played with two people. And then came Adventure. Not only wasn’t it the usual 27 minor variations on three two-player themes, it was specifically, unashamedly single player only. Here, loner, good luck storming the castle! And it had odd behaviors and minor flaws. I tried putting that magic bridge everywhere and ended up in some strange places. It also had a random mode, that might just set you up with an unwinnable scenario. And there was an Easter egg in it.

It was both different and a harbinger of things to come.

4. Castle Wolfenstein (1981) – Apple II

Graphics – 1981

This was the first game that I saw that indicated that I really, really needed to get a computer. An Apple II specifically, because that was what Gary had. And he also had Castle Wolfenstein.

It was not an easy game. You lost. A lot. The control system left something to be desired. You really needed a joystick to play. And there were so many quirks and strange behaviors that somebody created a utility program a couple years after it came out that basically “fixed” a lot of the worst annoyances. I bought it gladly.

Achtung! Give me your uniform.

But this game was the prototype for many that followed. You’re in a cell and you need to escape. You need make your way through the castle, picking up guns, keys, ammunition, German uniforms, and grenades. Oh, grenades were so much fun. There were other, later games I considered for this list, but when I broke them down, I often found that Castle Wolfenstein had done it already, in its own primitive way.

5. Wizardry (1981) – Apple II

Apple ][+ and Wizardry

Basically, the party based dungeon crawl in computer form. Monsters, mazes, traps, treasure, combat, and death. Oh, so much death. NetHack was a potential for this list, but I realized that randomness and ASCII graphics aside, Wizardry had pretty much everything it did.

And I spent hours playing. I mapped out the whole game on graph paper, including that one level with all the squares that would turn you around. The one with the pits of insta-death. It also taught me the word “apostate.”

6. Stellar Emperor (1985) – Apple II

The GEnie version of MegaWars III at its inception, it was my first foray into multiplayer online games. I have written about the game, even about winning.

Emperor of the Galaxy

But it was the online, playing with other people, usually the same people, making friends and enemies and having ongoing relationships that sold the game. Again, it was primitive, even in its day, with ASCII based terminal graphics. But there was magic in the mixture.

7. Civilization (1991) – Mac/Windows

The flat world of original Civ

Sid Meier was already something of a star by the time Civilization came out, but this cemented things as far as I was concerned. I was considering putting Civilization II on the list rather than this. Once I got Civ II, I never went back and played the original.

But that wasn’t because the original was crap. That was because the sequel built on what was great in the original. It was purely an evolutionary move. But it was the original that hooked me, so that has to get the nod for influential.

8. Marathon (1994) – Mac

Spooky

For me, this was the defining first person shooter. There was a single player campaign. There was a multiplayer deathmatch mode. There were a variety of weapons. There was a map editor and some mods and an online community that built up around it. Everything after Marathon was just an incremental improvement for me.

Marathon on my iPad

There have been better graphics, better rendering engines, different weapons, plenty of variety on arena options, all sorts of updates on match making and connectivity, but in the end those are just updates to what Marathon already did. To this day, I still sometimes say “I’ll gather” when creating a game or match for other people to join. That was the terminology from 1994. I wonder what Bungie has done since this?

9. TacOps (1994) – Mac/Windows

Before video games I played a lot of Avalon Hill war games. Those sorts of games made the natural transition to the computer, which was ideal for handling much of the housekeeping chores. However, in the transition, some old conventions got dragged along as well, like hexes. And I hate hexes. Yes, on a board game you need to use that hexgrid for movement. I could accept that for Tobruk set up on the kitchen table. But a computer was fully capable of handling movement without such an arbitrary overlay. A couple of games tried it, but they tended to fall into the more arcade-ish vein, which wasn’t what I wanted.

And then I picked up a copy of TacOps.

Giving orders on an open map

I bought it on a complete whim, picking up the very rare initial boxed version off the shelf at ComputerWare before it went completely to online sales. And it was a revelation. Hey, terrain governs movement. And cover. And visibility. That plus simultaneous movement phases rather than turn based combat meant wonderful chaos on the field. The game was good enough that the military of several countries contracted for special versions of the game to use as a training tool.

I originally had Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin on my list. That is where Battlefront.com really came into their own with the Combat Mission series. But aside from 3D graphics, TacOps had done it all already.

10. TorilMUD (1993) – various platforms

Have I not written enough about the last 20 years of TorilMUD? Precursor to the MMORPG genre for me. Without it I might not have understood that camping mobs for hours at a stretch was “fun.”

11. Diablo (1996) – Windows

A simpler time… in HELL

I have written quite a bit about my fondness for Diablo II, while I haven’t gone back to play the original Diablo since the sequel came out. But I wouldn’t be still talking about Diablo II or comparing the merits of Diablo III, Torchlight II, and Path of Exile had the original not been something very, very special.

12. Total Annihilation (1997) – Windows

Total Annihilation

Total Annihilation was not the first RTS game I played. I am pretty sure I played Dune II and Warcraft before it. It is not the RTS game I have played the most. I am sure I have more hours in both StarCraft and Age of Kings. But it was the first RTS game that showed me that the genre could be about something more than a very specific winning build order. All the units, on ground, in the air, on the water, were amazing. The player maps were amazing, and player created AIs were even better. The 3D terrain and line of sight and all that was wonderful. And new units kept getting released. And you could nuke things. I still find the game amazing.

13. EverQuest (1999) – Windows

Fifteen years later and nothing has made my mouth hang open like it did on the first day I logged into Norrath. I can grouse about SOE and the decisions they have made and the state of the genre, but that day back in 1999 sunk the hook into me good and hard and it hasn’t worked itself loose since. Pretty much what this whole blog is about.

Froon!

14. Pokemon Diamond (2006) – Nintendo DS

Before we got my daughter a DS lite and a copy of Pokemon Diamond, Pokemon was pretty much just a cartoon on TV and a card game somebody’s kid at work played. Sure, I knew who Pikachu was, but I had no real clue about the video game.

And then in watching my daughter play, I had to have my own DS and copy of the game. Make no mistake, despite its reputation as a kids game, Pokemon can be deep and satisfying. It tickles any number of gamer needs. My peak was in HeartGold/SoulSilver, where I finally caught them all.

Back when 493 was all

While I have stopped playing, that doesn’t mean I don’t think about buying a 3DS XL and a copy of Pokemon X or Y and diving back into the game. It is that good.

15. LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (2006) – many platforms

Filling this last slot… tough to do. There are lots of potential games out there. For example, I like tower defense games, but which one sold me on the idea? But for a game that launched me into a lot of play time over a series of titles, I have to go with LEGO Star Wars II.

LEGO Star Wars II

That is where Travelers Tales really hit their stride. The original LEGO Star Wars tried to hard to be a serious and difficult game. With this second entry, they realized the power of simply being fun and irreverent. That was the magic.

And I only have to look at the shelf of console games we have to see that LEGO games dominate as a result of this one title. They have evolved, and in some ways I think they have lost a bit of their charm by trying to do too much. We got the LEGO Movie Game for the PS3 and it didn’t have the joy of LEGO Star Wars II. Still, 8 years down the road, the influence of LEGO Star Wars II got us to try it.

Fools Errand?

Of course, putting limits like an arbitrary number on a list like this means it must ring false in some way. And what does influential really mean? I know what I said, but I can look back at that list and nitpick that, say, Castle Wolfenstein might not belong. And what about genres I missed, like tower defense? I could make the case that Defense Grid: The Awakening belongs on the list. What about games like EVE Online? Actually, I explained that one away to myself, seeing EVE as sort of the bastard child of Stellar Emperor and EverQuest or some such. And while TorilMUD is so powerful in my consciousness, would I have played it had it not been for Gemstone? Where does NBA Jams fit? And what other Apple II games did I miss? Should Ultima III be on there? Lode Runner? Karateka?

And somehow this all ties into my post about platforms and connectivity options I have had over the years.

Anyway, there is my list, and I stand firm behind it today. Tomorrow I might change my mind. You are welcome to consider this a meme and take up the challenge of figuring out your 15 most influential games.

Others who have attempted to pick their 15, each with their own history:

Civ V – Some Progress

I thought I was on to something today that would help with my Civilization V problems.

After shutting down all unnecessary processes on the machine, I decided to run try altering the run properties for the game.

My logon account is already in the Administrator group, so I didn’t think that would change anything, but XP has an option to run without protection from unauthorized activity.

I unchecked that box, wondering if it would change anything.

Really, it is hard to say if it did, or if just random chance or some other action got things going, but things did get going better than ever.

I managed to play 89 turns.

I was far enough into the game that I was starting to learn something about playing.

Most Turns Ever

I was invested enough in the game that I will probably go back and try to play from one of the save points.

However, after turn 89 the game hung. Something in the executable was stuck in a loop as it was again driving the processor full blast, although only one of the core this time, but nothing was happening. I let it churn for about 10 minutes, then force quit the process.

Of course, I was unable to launch the game again after that.

There seems to be two hurdles to playing.

First, there is launching the game. This seems to get hung up on something, as the game ab ends four out of five times before I get to the main menu.

Then there is actually keeping the game going. The process gets hung up on something, probably falling through an unhandled exception over and over again to infinity. But what the trigger is for that, I have not yet determined. I’ve spent so little time actually getting to that error.

Still, there was a bit of progress today. At least Steam rolled over and is actually measuring my play time in approximate hours (2) rather than minutes.

46 Minutes of Civilization V

Civilization II is probably the single player game I have spent the most time playing since I first purchased a computer.

And that is saying something, given the hours I spent, when I have many excess hour to spend, playing games like Wizardry or Ultima III back in the day.

Apple II+ and Wizardry

I played the original game Civilization and was hooked by its game play, so when Civilization II came out I was right there, day one.

Civ II was great, a huge improvement over its predecessor… so much so that I never considered and going back an playing the original game.

This is in contrast to Civilization III and Civilization IV, both of which eventually sent me back to Civ II.

There is a whole post in why I prefer Civ II. But for the moment I’ll leave it with the simple fact that I can still play the game on my current PC, more than 14 years after it originally shipped. It runs great and, in a move that seems genius in hindsight, it plays in a standard, re-sizable window so it even takes advantage of the fact that my monitor has gone from 800×600 to 1600×1200 in the intervening time. There are a few games I could mention that I wish did the same.

But back at launch the game was a beast.

The Civilization franchise has never bought into the Blizzard philosophy of low system requirements.

I don’t think I was able to play the game at its full potential until I picked up a 400MHz Pentium II years later. But by the time I had a Pentium IV, it ran smooth and fast. But it was a long time getting there.

And was Civ II stable at launch? Well, let’s just say that the auto-save feature was there for a good reason. Resuming games after a crash was a common occurrence.

So when I was tempted into buying Civilization V based somewhat on SynCaine’s posts about it, I was pretty sure the game was going to live up to the Civilization tradition of being a complete beast on day on.

I bought it via Steam, as much as I dislike Valve’s service. I’ve been screwed by Valve and their requirement that you must have an internet connection to play a single player game in the past. (Yes, that was a long time ago, but I can hold a grudge like no other when I’m in the mood.)

But since Civ V seems to be tied to the service no matter how you buy it, there didn’t seem much point in going another route.

And while I wasn’t happy about it, I certainly wasn’t expecting Steam to mock my misery.

How long have you managed to play?

Five days with the game and I’ve been able to play for 46 minutes.

And a good portion of those minutes were spent waiting while the game sat hung, driving all four cores of my Intel Core 2 Q6600 processor beyond 50% capacity. I had to bring up Task Manager just to see if the game still had a pulse.

I was not able to play at all for the first day.

It wasn’t until I turned off the intro movie, got into the options and turned down every possible setting to its absolute minimum, picked the default minimum game (changing any game setting is like hitting the fail button), and shut down every possible process on my system that I was able to hit my peak and get 46 turns into a game before it hung.

And I consider myself lucky to have gotten that far. Most times I just see this at launch.

And there is no recovery, no launching the game again. It is straight to the Start menu to reboot the system after any failure. I’ve tried. There is no hope without a reboot.

Okay, my system is aging, and not so gracefully. It isn’t at its most stable of late. But this is ridiculous.

I should have the horsepower to run the game. My quad 2.4 GHz CPU should be up to the task, being beyond the recommended system requirements, which specify a quad 1.8GHz or better. Woe to those who have only a single or dual core system.

And running with everything off, including virus protection, but the OS and Steam the game doesn’t appear to be trying to claim memory beyond the 2GB I have installed.

But it fails every time. Sooner or later, the carpet is yanked out from under me… and usually it is sooner.

Steam seems to have a patch for the game every night that fixes one crash or another. I’ll give Steam that, the patching happens fast. But each such patch only leads to disappointment as the game ab ends in the black rectangle where the intro movie should be running. (Couldn’t they put up a logo or something if you’ve turned the intro movie off?)

And all of this wouldn’t annoy me so much if the game didn’t appear to have promise, if it didn’t seem to have erased some of the sins of its two predecessors, if it didn’t feel like perhaps, maybe, it was getting back to the feel that made Civ II such a great game while keeping the bits of III and IV that actually improved the series.

I’d really like to play it and see if that was true.

But I can’t it seems, not yet.

I run Steam each evening in hopes that a new patch will make the game behave.

I wander through game sites looking for suggestions on how to tame the game.

But so far I’ve only managed 46 minutes. Barely enough for a EuroGamer review.

I guess I’ll have to go back to Civ II if I want a Civilization fix while I wait for Civ V’s day to come.

It should play really well in about 5 years. History repeats itself.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Tag Archives: Civilization

My Steam Replay for 2023… Plus My XBox 2023 Stats

Playing the Different Generations of Civilization Today

Civilization VI – 2016

Civilization: Beyond Earth – 2014

Civilization V – 2010

Civilization IV – 2005

Civilization III – 2001

Alpha Centauri – 1999

Civilization II – 1996

Civilization – 1991

Conclusions

Honest Game Trailers takes on Civilization

Fiddling with FreeCiv

Where is the Scenario Mod for This?

To the Series Born

Picking My 15 Most Influential Games

Civ V – Some Progress

46 Minutes of Civilization V