Life thousands of years ago must have been difficult. Guess what, today studies took a backseat as I played Civilization 4: Beyond The Sword. So for a greater part of the day I found myself struggling with the game.
It has been 2 weeks or so I joined, after ignoring at least a thousand requests from potential ‘neighbours’, the FarmVille bandwagon, discarding my “Farmville is crap” notion in a momentary lapse of reason :P Once there, had a good look around in the virtual farm-world only to arrive at the conclusion that it’s extremely boring. But the success of FarmVille can be attributed to the fact that it’s so deeply tied with Facebook. Your fellow ‘farmers’ are your real life friends who actually get pleased if you play the good samaritan and drive away the crows from destroying their crops, or fertilize their crops for that matter!
It was while playing FarmVille that I thought why waste time with this low-res 2D silly game when there are so many great games out there to play. My favourite genres happen to be RTS (Real-time strategy) and CMS (constrution and management simulation). Among CMS, the city-building subgenre more specifically. Make no mistake, I am no diehard gamer. All the games I have ever played on the computer are (the years indicate when I played them):
- Age of Empires II – 2002
- Max Payne – 2002
- Max Payne 2 – 2007, replayed in 2009
- Zeus: The Master of Olympus – 2003, replayed in 2009
- The Gladiators: Galactic Circus Games – 2003
- Tropico – 2003
- Rise of Nations - 2009
- Little bits of Road Rash, FIFA, etc 2003
As you can see, I ain’t much into action. Max Payne being the only exception. But then, it is a beautiful game with a compelling storyline! I am more into srategy games than anything. Two great city-building games I have played are Tropico and Zeus: The Master of Olympus. FarmVille is a business simulation game. Both business simulation and city-building are CMS subgenres. CMS and Strategy games often go hand in hand, both incorporating aspects from each other. Guess that’s enough reasoning why FarmVille encouraged me to go back to my love – strategy games that is, that is. :)
Now that I am home with only one book to read (can’t stop cursing myself – how could I forget to bring DC Dutta) and not much to do, add to that that the home desky has recently been overhauled (1 gig DDR2 RAM, new mobo, new dual-core CPU) with enough power to play less resource-intensive games like Civ 4, I installed this Seid Meyer game with no second thoughts.
I already know all the exciting things about Civilization series from the distant memories I have from reading Digit years back. That it is turn-based and strategy gaming at it’s best. My initial thoughts on the game ain’t promising though! :( I like the way most things are automated. I just give an order to construct a wall or barrack in a city and it gets done. What lets me down is the combat! Totally clueless with this one-to-one combat. Pretty lame! But it is one of the greatest games out there! What I’m missing? A lot of Googling din’t come to any help either. Apparently some mod would let me enjoy one-to-many combat. But I am feeling kinda download-weary. So here I am struggling in 1500 B.C.
[...] sleeping and playing Civilization 4. Quite troubled by the game though Wrote all about it on BB (My Civilization IV Predicament). Tropico 3, the other game I installed din’t run as expected what with the low-end [...]
u gotta try knight rider 2