So, am I the only ‘kid’ around here that plays games? I’ll be playing Ghost Recon on X-Box Live tomorrow as a break (hehehe) from hanging drywall.
Beer, X-Box and Drywall.
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I have a playstation 2, wish it played halo...
By live I assume you mean with other people over the internet type thing? Wondering how that works, is it pretty good or still need some refinement?
Stop screwing around here and get screw'n that rock to the wall... :)
No console games.
A few of the better computer games. I'm a Cid Meyers fan. CIV, in one form or another, has been on every computer I have owned for many years. Decades.
All of the Civilization games, I, II and III are based on starting as the leader of a small tribe about 6000BC. You build your first city and the fun starts. Each city you build can either produce an improvement or a unit. Improvements make the city easier to control, more productive or easier to defend. Units are military, for defense or conquest, or civilian, to build infrastructure or create more cities.
The game, if you survive that long, goes until 4000AD, or there abouts, and can be won through culture, diplomacy, military victory or landing a colony on another planet.
The trick is that there are as many as 15 other tribes doing exactly the same thing. When you meet each other you can trade, form alliances or fight each other. Conflicts, not all are wars as there is bribery and cities can spontaneously switch sides if they like your civilization more, often occur over resources or strategic positions.
If you build a strong military you likely have a poor country with little trade. Both of which can easily make your nation technologically backward. Go too long like this and your opponents will be flying airplanes while your troops still carry spears. Don't build enough of a military and one, or commonly more than one of your neighbors will conquer your nation. Often shrewd diplomatic moves can get you farther than a strong military. The game is a balancing act trying to get what you absolutely must have to survive with what resources you have at hand.
CIV2 is a classic that has much charm. The newer CIV3 is a little more detailed. A hard game to understand if you have no background with previous systems. Difficult to master. It has an add on pack that adds a few civilizations and enables players to go at it across the net or play by e-mail. I haven't tried it yet.
A strategic game there is little violence other than the icons can get rough with each other. I enjoy the manifold strategies and multilevel intricacies involved. The turn base system allows me to stop, get dinner, visit FHB and watch a bit of TV while I contemplate the next move. Being completely different from my normal job it clears my head of the normal troubles and worldly conflicts without numbing out or letting my brain, what little remains, rot.
It beats kicking the cat around the house, plotting the overthrow of the government and dreaming up ever more creative ways to insult past presidents.
CIV III, now thats a game, but I cant play it when schools in or I get nothing done.View ImageGo Jayhawks
CIV is a dangerous series of games. There is a strong "one more turn" tendency. If I don't keep track I feel like I could easily spend days working my way through just one more crisis situation. I have a task scheduler running that keeps me honest when I play. I have known a few players who fell in.
Man, you just cost me about a week of wasted time. I loved Civ I, heard that Civ II wasn't worth it, and now I'll have to get Civ III
Have you tried any of the other Real-Time Strat games (well, Civ is turn-based, but they have the same kind of strategic thinking feel). They feed right in to my napoleon complex. Try Starcraft or Warcraft if you haven't. You can get the originals for real cheap.
Ben
I heard those CIV games are great...I've gotta try them.
I play the online half-life mods. Played Counterstrike, Day of Defeat and Natural Selection lately. If you buy Half-Life ($20.00) you can download lots of Mods (other games) that run on the same software engine.....and they're free. You play people from all over the world. You can communicate with them by typing or through your mic. Counterstrike and Natural Selection are real strategy, team playing games.
A new game, America's Army, is made with your tax dollars. It is about a 300 meg download and it's free. VERY intense strategy game...........awesome effects. Need to have a computer faster then 800 mhz and dsl or cable is nice. Way cool!
jocobe
Those are good games.
Warcraft 3 is worth every penny of purchase price, and then some.
Loooooong time to play through the campaigns. It kept me busy all through the Christmas holiday.
Quittin' Time
Boy did you miss the boat. My own opinion, and the view of the vast majority of knowledgeable people, CIV2 was much better than CIV1. In fact in some ways CIV2 is better than CIV3. I am going to ignore the universally panned and embarrassing CIV/CTP. It was boring and lacked a soul.
CIV2 is good. It has a lot going for it. A more detailed and well rounded game than CIV1 it kept much of its charm and rhythm. CIV2 added interlocking concepts and strategies that allow a greater depth of play and an improved AI to keep things interesting. CIV2 rapidly became the gold standard for strategy games. Easy enough for anyone with some strategy game experience to get into quickly but with enough depth to keep the gronards challenged.
CIV3 it a continuation along these lines. The people who mastered CIV2 needed more depth. The AI became too predictable. The road to victory too well trodden. CIV3 answered many of these points. Depth was added. Diplomacy updated. The AI strengthened and more methods to win, or loose, spliced in. CIV3 is not, IMHO, a good starting point for anyone breaking into strategic games. The learning curve is too steep, the conceptual dynamics too subtle, the AI too ruthless for any but a dedicated, read as hard headed, few.
CIV1 was a light, trivial pass time with a moderate amount of thinking involved. With only a limited learning curve you could be dominating the world, or giving it a good go, in an hour or two. CIV2 is more of a commitment. With more skull work and detail, especially when played at higher difficulty levels, larger maps and more civilizations to compete with, the games could last for days More involved it kept much of the easy interface and style remains very playable once you understand the basics.
CIV3 is a larger commitment in time, effort and study just to learn the game. The concepts, rules and game play are well articulated in a 234 page manual with charts and an appendix. You can give it a bash without reading, and understanding, the manual but your unlikely to get far.
The concepts and strategies are nuanced and interlocking. Failing in one small area often spells doom as the AI can and will take advantage of any weakness or opening. Often errors in strategy will only become clear dozens of turns after the decisions were made. All of this is best experienced at the higher difficulty settings where the AI is unleashed. Just about when you think you have everything under control the AI hits you.
When the AI attacks it will come with a massive force and will not only attack units it will destroy your infrastructure. All the while it will collude with other nations to open second, or third fronts against you and will seek to cut your lines to trade or vital resources. In just few turns you go from seeing possible world dominance to struggling for life.
This is not a game for the short winded or easily discouraged. It takes time to learn and can only be mastered with experience and many defeats. In my experience beginners in the field of strategic gaming tend to give up or resort to cheats or mods to get by and often never get close to mastering the game.
Get CIV2. Its around $10 in the discount bin. Play it. Enjoy the learning curve and the inherent humor. I mean you are missing out on Elvis as your moral advisor and a drunken military advisor in times of great victory. There are many fine hours of fun and intellectual push ups to be had in CIV2. To this day I have CIV2 on my HD for quick games and light entertainment. When you get bored with CIV2 and have become an old hand steeped in dirty tricks and subtle dealings give CIV3 a go. In CIV3, when you crank up the difficulty, you will need all your skills. All the better to feel good about a victory.
Ah, my mistake. I was thinking of Civ Call To Power, not Civ II
One problem I had with the original Civ is that I found it difficult to win in the most difficult Emporer mode without resorting to good old butt-kicking. I could get to space only on the easier settings. In the original version, the more difficult the setting, the quicker your neighbors got technology, and if you didn't get chariots and go knocking on everyone's door (particularly the French - the game designers must agree with most of the posts here!), you were doomed. It sounds like the newer versions are much more balanced.
Again, thanks for killing my productivity for the next few months...
Re:"Again, thanks for killing my productivity for the next few months..."
What are friends for?
Try not to fall in too deep. Having some human contact, a bit of sunshine and a shower once a week or so is a good idea. Many don't meet the minimums. Everyone starts with "Just one more turn." Followed by "Just one more turn." 2 hours, 2 days or 2 months later. For some it is virtual computerized crack cocaine. Check for recovery groups in your area.
My son (10) loves Civilization, Sim City, Ceasar II, Railroad Tycoon, Roller Coaster, all that stuff. They're addictive and he sucks me into playing now and then ("hey dad, can you give me a hand here ?"). He also like RPG games like Myst, Avarice, Under a Killing Moon, Seventh Guest, etc.
We both, of course, like the general games, like Flying Unlimited, FS, Apache, Hind, Nascar,... .
Phill Giles
The Unionville Woodwright
Unionville, Ontario
DW gave me Age of Empires for xmass in 2001. Just started playing it two weeks ago when I went on a crazy shift (5:00pm to 3:00am). I am up and around when my adopted son (grandson) gets home from kindergarden. He has abandoned his GameCube for sitting in PaPa's lap and playing my games. We are both novices with it, but I can see how easily one could get hooked on these things.
Dave
I work at "a large Redmond software company", and have spent far too much time playing MechAssault on XBox Live. I have a copy of Ghost recon but haven't really played with it much.
Luckily, my current big project is doing all the finish carpentry at a ski cabin, and there's no XBox up there...
My gamertag is CeeEff
Don't I wish.
I played nintendo with the kids when they were young. At one time, I spent a couple days, winding my way completely through Zelda (or Zelda II), and made a huge map of the whole game. It took up the whole wall of my son's bedroom.
He and his friends loved it. They hadn't been able to make their way through. Not because they couldn't do the puzzles, or weren't quick enough with the thumb action. They just couldn't navigate all the way through. With the map, they found thier way through.
I play regular old games on the PC. My favorites are RPG's but I spend the most time with strategies. You can play the strategies many times over. Once or twice through an RPG, and it's ho-hum. The whole Ultima series was the absolute best.
I'd like to try that new Lord of the Rings game. The old one sucked big time, but the new one is supposed to be good.
Quittin' Time
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.
>So, am I the only 'kid' around here that plays games?
Yuck. Never liked playing them. Still don't. Back in 74 or so when the only school computer was a RCA teletype-style connection to the local university, the only games were things like blackjack. I played it once, and decided it would be more fun to write my own than to play theirs. That got me into writing software, though not games, and for me, the rest is history.
I play a little Tetris on my old Mac at my office and sometimes Microsoft Flight Simulator WWII Europe. One of my sons plays online games 32 hours a day. (Fathers always exagerate!) Right now he's into Never Winter Nights.
It doesn't matter how fast you get there, it just matters that you go in the right direction.
Video crack.
Are you referring to me or my son?It doesn't matter how fast you get there, it just matters that you go in the right direction.
What about MAME? (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator)
I just downloaded a bunch of games for that, it's pretty cool to go back to the simple Arcade games after all these years. My 17yo brother is hooked on GTA: Vice City, meanwhile I have been playing Asteroids, Spy Hunter, MsPacman, Super Mario Bros, etc.
Back in the heady days of Napster etc, you could download any game you wanted from lots of places, but now they are all off the web because of copyright stuff. Seriously, what copyright owner is still making royalties off Asteroids or Space Invaders?
Yeah, I just downloaded Double Dragon for MAME because I forgot how many quarters I wasted on that one. Nothing like a game where the most effective punch that will lay out any bad guy is the reverse elbow punch!
Ahh, the classic "Walk to the Right" game! That one is awesome.
The thing I find amazing is that I remember all these details about these games after years of not playing or even thinking about them. Kind of scary, really. Like where the secret coins in Super Mario Bros. are and which fork in the road gets you which weapons van in Spy Hunter.
It's classic operant conditioning - do this behavior, get this reward. Think of all the memory we've wasted - it's like all those Gilligan's Island episodes you remember.
Vietnam Special Assingment 2, SimCity 3000, Oil Tycoon, The 'Mech Collection, and Trophy Hunter 2 are all on my computer. Oil Tycoon and 'Mech Commander have been taking up quite a bit of time. I have played the Black Knight expansion of Mechwarrior online and can really get lost in it. Seems to be a good way to vent a bad days stress and frustrations.
Every once in a while I still play Gran Turismo or GT2 on the playstation.TCW Specialists in Custom Remodeling.
Still trying to get the hang of Pong.
Too many tracers.