Free Candy For Everyone

In between all my other gaming (*cough* World of Warcraft), I’ve found time to play through Civilization Revolution. This is the newest in my long beloved Civ series, first time ever designed from the ground up for consoles. I got the Xbox 360 version because I love achievements (love them!). Today I wrapped up my achievement collection, getting the last one to bring me to the full 1000 tally. Now that I’ve done that I feel like I’ve pretty much finished the game and could give my thoughts.

It retains the general flavor of a Civ game - you start from the dawn of civilization with a single settler unit to build a city with. A lot of the general gameplay is quite familiar to long time Civ players, but the presentation is very much for the console. The graphics are bright and colorful, the interface is streamlined, and you have less micromanaging to do.

Overall, I think they did a really nice job, conceptually. The flow of gameplay is nice and the console controls work well. But I have a few major problems with the game. The first is a bit insurmountable, I’m afraid. I like all the complexity of the PC versions of Civ. All the streamlining they did to put it on console removed a lot of the gameplay that I quite like. Overall, the console version can’t quite win my heart away from the PC. But for newcomers to the game it will probably be a great introduction.

The next two problems are with game balance and bugs. I feel like the game forces you to play a particular way. You can either rush and take out your enemies before they build up their culture, or you can settle in for the long haul in which case you better have enough culture or you will lose. Culture is a concept the Civ series introduced in its third installment. Basically, buildings in your cities generate culture, and each city has a cultural border that grows out around it. As this cultural border comes up against other civs, it can swallow them up and cause their cities to become yours without a single act of war. In the PC versions, there are more ways to prevent the cultural flip than there seem to be on the console. I found that going for a military strategy in the middle of the game without any culture was totally futile as I’d take a city only to have it flip back to its previous owner a couple turns later. Argh.

And then there are the numerous bugs. The pathing is really bad. I’ve seen two major issues - one where you send a unit to a far away destination and it starts going in a direction that won’t actually get it there. It then will go back and forth until you stop it, never getting to its goal. The other is that sometimes it doesn’t pick the shortest path. I have to micromanage the legs of the journey to keep my units from going the longer way around. Grr.

Last negative is big for me, considering I’m an AI engineer. The enemy AI is just frustrating and bad. This is a game that should be in large part about diplomacy. But the opponents in this game just hate you if you’re winning and hate you if you’re losing. If you have a lot of gold, they demand you give it to them and go to war if you don’t. If you have a lot of culture they might just declare war on you because that pisses them off. There’s no way to have an amiable relationship with anyone except by constantly giving in to their demands. Plus I’ve seen the AI try to send settlers repeatedly in the wrong direction, where they’re getting trapped by my cultural borders but they could just go the other way instead and settle plenty of open land. I think the diplomacy could have really been improved, it was so much better in the PC versions. Maybe Soren should have been called in as a consultant!

Anyways, I certainly played a lot of it, gathering up those achievements. I haven’t played multiplayer at all yet, though I checked out some forums today and it sounds pretty unbalanced, like there’s only one really strong winning strategy. Doesn’t sound compelling to me! So I’m probably done with Civ Rev for now, until they patch it or something. Maybe I’ll go play a game of Civ 4 instead…

Guitar Hero III came out today. I wasn’t really that excited for it, since it wasn’t made by Harmonix, the fine studio that crafted the first two games. Plus the song list wasn’t that impressive to me. The GH games have been trending towards super hardcore. Each title, the difficulty ratchets up a few notches. The song selection has been becoming a bit too metal for me too. But there’s still something about Guitar Hero.

I was kind of looking forward to it, but nothing compares to my excitement over Rock Band, the next music game out of Harmonix. It’s not just guitars, it’s also singing and drums! It just looks so awesome and it comes out in less than a month. But until then, we have GHIII. My boyfriend is much more of a die-hard GH fan than I am, so we headed over to Best Buy this morning to pick up a copy.

To our surprise, they had a demo of Rock Band! OMG! It was so fantastic! We played two songs in the store, the first was “Wanted Dead or Alive”, with me on vocals and my guy on the drums. It was just super fun. He’s a drummer for real, and he rocked out on the hardest difficulty level. He said it was pretty close to really drumming. We switched after that for Faith No More’s “Epic”, he played guitar and I tried out the drums (on easy! I’m no drummer!). It was so much fun! I was just grinning like a maniac. Rock Band is awesome, yes yes.

We considered staying there and playing all day but figured they might kick us out of the store eventually. And we had some GHIII to play. I have to say that Neversoft did a good job on GHIII. They had to write the game from scratch, they didn’t actually have the GH1/2 codebase. But it felt like Guitar Hero. There are some major complaints - the difficulty is a mess. The songs don’t get evenly harder as you play through them. They have a co-op career mode, which is quite cool. You can play through and unlock songs together. But the order of songs in co-op mode is completely different than it is in solo career mode and it really makes no sense. In either one, there are songs in much later brackets that are tons easier than the earlier ones. Very uneven. And overall, the game is much harder than GHII. I’d say that it’s as hard on Hard as GHII was on Expert, the next difficulty level up. I wouldn’t even want to begin to try this game on Expert. Hard was quite hard enough.

We played all the way through co-op career mode on Medium, then got about halfway through solo career mode on Hard (trading off songs). We tried out the multiplayer battle mode in between. The idea is that instead of trying to score points, you’re just trying to get the other player to fail. You get attack powerups at certain points in the song and can attack your opponent. Some of them are just a minor annoyance, like the “broken string” that makes you repeatedly tap a button until you “fix” the string. Some are just brutal, especially in combination. One attack temporarily increases the song’s difficulty level for a while. One makes the note indicators blink out, which can be really confusing if you’re not sure what notes you need to play. One turns on lefty flip so when it shows you hitting the right most button on the screen you really need to be hitting the left most button. That one really confused me.

If no one fails out of the song you go into sudden death overtime. The song starts over and the first person to miss any note loses. I don’t think either of us have ever played as perfectly as during those overtimes (and we got into them pretty much every time, we’re evenly matched, I guess!). In this mode, the only attack is this evil “drain” that is a floating icon that gets closer and closer to the bottom of the screen, eventually obscuring the notes you need to press and just making you fail. The battle mode was cool and creative. I remember reading about it ahead of time and not really thinking it was all that important, but we had a blast with it.

Overall, GHIII was a surprise to me. The gameplay felt solid and there was a lot of nice tweaks to the standard GH gameplay to make things better. The difficulty is a shame, and I wish they’d arranged the songs in a better order. But it was good enough to tide me over until Rock Band. But when that comes up, goodbye Guitar Hero! I will have a new gaming love.

I’m a big fan of just about all the games that Harmonix has made. They continue to make really great music games that are unlike anything else. Everyone at work has been all abuzz about their latest, Guitar Hero. I was reluctant to pick it up for several reasons, the biggest being that I have too many games to play and too little time. But it has been getting such rave reviews from the gaming press and everyone that I know who’s tried it that I couldn’t resist.

Guitar Hero is a game for the Playstation2 that let’s you feel like a rock star. It comes with a custom guitar controller, which puts the price of the package at $70. Not too bad, considering the controller is a hefty piece of equipment. It’s about three feet long, has five fret buttons, a strum bar, a whammy bar, and a start and select button for navigation. Here’s a picture of the stuff:

Let me qualify all this by saying that I play guitar. I’ve been playing for about 15 years, and I’m certainly not a rock star, but I’m comfortable with the instrument, I have a good sense of rhythm and I do alright. I still had an awesome time playing this game. My co-workers who were playing it are not musicians. So I was sorta like, “well, maybe it’s fun for you, but I can actually play the guitar for real, why would I want to pretend?” Well, because you have a whole band playing and flashing lights and score cards and cheering crowds, that’s why!

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I finally completed a game of Civilization IV today, so felt I was now qualified to share my thoughts on it. Let me start by saying that as soon as I won, I opened up World of Warcraft and started playing that. Which should be a big indicator that there’s something wrong in the world of Civ4.

I’ll start with what I like. They went with a full 3D engine using Gamebryo, and it was a good move. The units look good, the cities look more alive and are now actually integrated into the world. Here is one of my cities, at three levels of detail.

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My Civ 4 review is still forthcoming. I got to spend about three hours playing the game yesterday and got some decent first impressions, but as with Age III, I don’t want to pass judgement without some more time figuring out the nuances. A real brief summation of my first impression (completely subject to change) - it’s a lot like Civ 3. Go figure! The general feel of the game is quite similar. The techs are different, the city improvements have gone through some changes, but the idea is the same. (Thank goodness, or we’d all be up in arms, wouldn’t we?) I did feel like there was a more drastic change between Civ 2 and Civ 3 (which I know not everyone liked, but it is nice to see change and experimentation). But like I said, I haven’t spent enough time to really get into the fine details.

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