Update: I don’t think I could possibly have put it better than how the guys at Penny Arcade have paid tribute.

Update 2: There’s a great obituary for Gygax over at Ars Technica. It’s amazing to think of the impact this man’s work has made on so many people in the world!

As I mentioned before, Sony and Nintendo were doing most of the marketing – they each had large areas assigned to them and were showing off at least a dozen games each as well as their respective consoles and handhelds. Sony in particular went to great effort to put their games on large, 1080p HDTV screens to maximise the eye candy of the PS3. Nintendo, on the other hand, seemed content to let the games do the talking for them (Super Mario Galaxy had queues of people lining up to play). Microsoft had a huge inflated Master Chief helmet but they weren’t really showing off much in the way of games, only Halo 3 and Mass Effect running on a couple small screens. One of the interesting things is that, because you have both consoles makers and games publishers at the same event, it’s sometimes confusing as to who is responsible for what. For instance, Yamaha had an area and were using a Wii to show off their surround sound systems but from a distance is almost looked like another Nintendo booth.

The games of the day for me were Crysis, Heavenly Sword and Assassin’s Creed. Crysis looks gorgeous but mostly the same in terms of gameplay (no surprise there). Heavenly Sword I had to describe to someone as an “ocular orgasm” because it just looks that good. The gameplay did look a bit tame but I think the visuals alone would justify a purchase if it cost about $75 (it doesn’t unfortunately). Assassin’s Creed was, I think, the darling of the expo as I believe I saw it in three different places: running on both Xbox 360s and PS3s. I couldn’t really tell much of a difference between the two versions, but at one point it looked like the Xbox version didn’t have shadows turned on. Weird. The game seems to be similar, gameplay-wise, to Thief or Splinter Cell but the graphics are very “next-gen” and it actually manages to convey a living world, filled with people. Most parts of the game I saw had at least 20 people on screen at any one time in narrow city streets.

Super Mario Galaxy had a lot of people excited about it and the crowd around the three TVs running it were larger than most. I’m still trying to work out how exactly it’s played as there seems to be an odd two-player setup where two people control a single Mario. It does look like great fun though and the playing area is huge and seemingly allows for complete non-linear exploration.

There were a few competitions set up with Call of Duty 4, Unreal Tournament 3 and so on. Some even had commentators. I’m not really into those sort of multiplayer games so I watched for a few minutes and moved on.

The main stage had different events running throughout the weekend but I never ended up checking any out. It looked like the usual sort of stuff though: panels, presentations and competitions. I think there was even a cosplay competition on at one point – obviously an attempt to try and maximise the audience for the expo. Unsurprisingly, the cosplay competition had what I think was the most number of people watching it.

Speaking of all things anime, Madman Entertainment had a booth in the middle of the convention hall. I ended up spending an obscene amount of money updating my anime and manga collections. I worked it out and I ended up saving roughly $60 by buying the stuff there instead of online or in a store. From now on I should try to do all my shopping at conventions!

One of the highlights of the expo was seeing tons of people walking around in some shirts from the Swinburne gamers club. Basically the shirt was red, with a send up of the OFLC’s R18+ logo, instead having the text beside it: “This rating not suitable for mature adults.” This is an old issue but still one that I think baffles a lot of people – why does Australia not have an R rating for games? All the other ratings have been brought into line with the movie ratings but for some bizarre reason the OFLC has refused to allow 18+ games to be sold (legally) in Australia. A sea of bright red shirts was a welcome sign of passive protest.

Something that didn’t surprise me but I still found interesting was the presence of a toned down version of “booth babes”. Basically, half the booths there had at least one, but usually several, hot women dressed in revealing clothes (hot pants, low-cut tops) to draw attention. What I found hilarious was at one booth where a bunch of guys were sitting around ogling Assassin’s Creed running on a 102 inch Panasonic TV – the two girls wandering around weren’t even getting a glance! I must admit, I only looked once myself before turning back to the game. Since I’m sure some women will be reading this, rest assured that they also had (what I assume to be) hot guys wearing tight t-shirts. I can’t comment too much on this though as I wasn’t really paying attention to them.

So overall, I think the event was a success. There were plenty of people there and everyone looked like they were having a blast (sometimes literally, in a virtual sense). I definitely had fun and came away with a ton of swag so I’m happy, even though I didn’t actually spend more than a few hours there on Friday and Saturday. Did any readers end up attending? I’d like to hear what other people thought about it.

Colours

Civilization colours are too similar. Especially if there are a couple civs next to other with varying shades of blue it’s really hard to tell them apart. I guess in a game with 16 civs this is hard to get around but if there’s only five then why are three of them blue?

Camera

The zoom level isn’t saved with the saved games so I have to adjust it every time I resume one. For some reason examining a city when a unit is selected moves the camera back to the active unit when you exit the city view – seeing as the camera “slides” rather than “jumps” this results in you have a camera flying all over the place when you’re trying to examine a city to find out where to move a unit to.

City Switching

“The people of X are rightly asking to join to Y empire. Doing so will make Z happy with us.” But … I founded the city, it’s on a different continent to the Y empire and the population is 100% my own! Why would they want to switch?

Artificial Stupidity

Mostly to do with the diplomacy screen. If a civilization offers me, say, Rice for Wheat then why would they say the deal isn’t good enough if I instead offer them Wheat and 200 gold? It makes no sense whatsoever. And why would a civilization continually declare war on me every few centuries, even though every time I take a few more of their cities, I have clearly superior military forces and they apparently like me? Maybe it has something to do with that fact that this same civilization was upset about one of my spies being caught in one of their cities 1600 hundred years later? I’m no sure no-one who holds a grudge for that long is entirely sane.

Religions

I can kind of understand why monastaries become obsolete with Scientific Method but unfortunately you still need to have built them to train missionaries to spread religions. Why? It basically means that if you discover Scientific Method and haven’t built any monasteries then you’re going to have a really hard time spreading religions (which I like doing as it’s an easy way to increase culture). I’d suggest the proper way to handle this is to allow any city with a certain religion to build missionaries of that type (after discovering Scientific Method) or to move the missionary production ability to temples. Further to this, there’s no guarantee that a missionary will successfully spread a religion – I would have thought having the Free Religion civic would make the chance of spreading 100% but apparently not.

Sounds

Whose idea was it to have the sound for war being declared be the same as the sound for peace being declared? Take a moment to think about how confusing that is…

Such is the case with the newest Ctrl+Alt+Del:

Now compare that to this Penny Arcade comic from exactly two months ago:

Damn, Tim could have at least tried to throw in some Lord of the Rings reference at the same time…

If you’ve never played one of the Civilization games then you only really need to know that they’re all epic-scale turn-based strategy games that encompass the whole of human history. Each game has built upon the last and the series has continued to grow and get better and better with each version.

I must say that, when I played Civ4 for the first time earlier in the year, or late last year, I wasn’t overly impressed: there were some show stopping bugs, some of the units felt unbalanced, my traditional “introverted” approach to the game didn’t work at all and so on. To top it off the the new game’s 3D graphics were killing my old desktop computer and the game ran like a dog. Rather impressive considering that same computer ran Half-Life 2 quite well. All-in-all I didn’t like it and I went back to Civ3.

I don’t know if it’s because I had lower expectations coming back to it, if they fixed the bugs and flaws, or if it’s because of my new computer scoffs at the game’s paltry attempts to slow it down but I find I really enjoy it now! I’m guessing it’s a combination of all those things actually.

So, the Complete version of the game comes with the base Civ4 and the expansions Warlords and Beyond the Sword. I’m not really sure what changes either of them made as I didn’t play the base version for very long because of the aforementioned problems I had with it. From what I can gather Warlords was mostly about expanding the combat options whereas Beyond the Sword expanded on the non-war aspects of the game. All three versions of the game are playable by running the different programs (all in the menu) but I don’t know why anyone would play anything other than the BtS version as it incorporates all the other material.

Some of the things I enjoy that have bee added to Civ4 are the concept of religions and corporations, which makes for a nice augmentation to culture, and random events, which require you to respond to occurrences that pop up every now and then and usually require to make a decision which has minor consequences. Examples of random events are:

• A natural disaster strikes – do you spend money from the treasury to help the city or let some of the people die?
• A Romeo and Juliet scenario occurs with one of the families being citizens of a rival nation – do you praise the young couple and risk the wrath of the other leader or admonish them and upset some of your own people?
• A new play has been getting rave reviews – do you watch the taxes roll in or spend money promoting the play worldwide for an increase in culture?

What you can see from these is that the events really bring a feeling of a living society rather than some generic empire. There are also quests which you can choose to complete for some reward. The only one I’ve had so far involved building coliseums in all my cities to allow the formation of a new football league, with the reward being an extra culture point per coliseum from then on.

Religion and corporations work slightly differently but the concepts behind them are similar: you can set up organisations in your civilization that can spread all over the world and extend your influence and bring in more wealth and power. Religions get founded when someone discovers certain technologies for the first time. Corporations get founded by creating them with Great Merchant units, so it’s a bit more difficult to do, and they consume resources like oil, sheep and so forth.

Other things that are new to this game are things like colonies. You can actually give some of your cities independence to form a vassal state. Similarly, you can negotiate for an existing civilization to become a vassal state to your own (or vice versa), although this usually only occurs as part of a peace treaty. There are tons of things like this in the game so it’s a very rich experience and requires a but of work to master all of the nuances of it.

The interface for the game deserves special mention. Everything is very well laid out and once you adjust to it you’ll find almost everything you need to know can be found out by looking at the main world screen or my hovering the mouse over something. Because of the 3D engine you can zoom in and out as you please to get a wider or narrower view as you desire.

Technically, the game is well done. I believe any issues that existing in the original game have since been patched. I can’t comment on any performance issues for older computers but a new one should be fine: I’m running everything on high settings and haven’t found any slow downs. I do like that the game supports widescreen straight off and it looks great using it. You get plenty of room to see the main view and all the information around the sides.

Seeing as the game is so addictive there’s one new feature that I really should be using: the alarm clock. I think this is a great addition to the game and yet it’s so very simple. There’s also no problem adding a clock or alarm to a game of this type either since the game moves at your pace and you can stop at any time. Well, I should say you’re allowed to stop at any time. Naturally you have to play for “just one more turn”.

In the end I think that’s the most I can say about this game – it really is that addictive. I’ve been playing a single marathon-length game for several days now, which adds up to almost a full 24 hours of gaming. For a single game.