Everybody Wants To Rule The World
This week, Alexander Chatziioannou delivered a review of Civilization VI. He pointed out that the game had taken strides to make total and utter domination a little more difficult in a way that livened up the game’s moment-to-moment decision making. Drinking_With_Skeletons thinks the game still has some ways to go before it finds that balance of empowerment and challenge, mostly because your AI competitors kind of suck:
My big issue is that, outside of religious expansion, the AI is pretty pathetic. I don’t particularly want an amazing Civ AI; I want to be able to win, after all. But it’s dim to the point of being boring. My most recent game as Scythia saw me on a continent without iron, forcing me to field an army comprised almost entirely of light cavalry (thanks to Scythia’s handy bonus in that department), which would have been an interesting tactical challenge if the AI could be bothered to put up anything resembling a fight.
Merlin The Tuna agreed and noted this is especially troublesome considering how many concepts Civ VI seems to pick up from multiplayer board games:
That, I think, is one of the fascinating things about Civ these days. It’s clearly drawing on modern board-game design. The city districts seem to be straight out of games like Suburbia or Between Two Cities, and the increasing systematic emphasis on early game decisions massively impacting your late-game choices reflects a lot of engine-builder games like 7 Wonders. Those elements were always a part of Civ, but they’ve really been emphasized of late.
And that’s all really interesting, but it rubs uncomfortably against Civ being a fundamentally singleplayer game and game AI being difficult to implement. I have no doubt that the rules would make for a totally engrossing multiplayer experience, and Civ games have been good about presenting multiplayer as an option. But the logistics and length of a game are so nuts that the “default” assumption has always been playing alone, despite it seeming to be a dramatically inferior option.
You know what doesn’t sound like an inferior option? Purple Tentacle’s method for playing Civilization:
I don’t play these games “correctly.” I don’t play them for the challenge; I set the map to huge, the difficulty to whatever the lowest is, the enemy civilizations to a single AI, and then try to build the most impressive civilization ever. My main objective is to get all the wonders possible. I get really upset and sometimes restart if the AI beats me to one. I think of it as an advanced zen garden.
Kind Of A Big Deal
With its last gasp, Horrors Week gave us an article from Alexander Chatziioannou that brought the achievements of an overlooked ’80s gem to light. Project Firestart, he argued, was the first game to really put together the template for survival-horror that Alone In The Dark and Resident Evil would later standardize. For 1989, it’s an incredibly ambitious piece of design, but thanks to some extenuating circumstances, it’s become little more than an oddity. The biggest obstacle to the game becoming as prevalent as it should have been was the state of the Commodore 64 at the time of its release. By the end of Project Firestart’s lengthy production, the Commodore was on its deathbed, but just a few years prior, this seminal computer was at the forefront of a radical gaming era that produced loads of imaginative works from tiny teams and solo developers. Down in the comments, The_Misanthrope bemoaned how the Commodore 64 has been relatively overlooked in gaming history, which naturally sparked a great history lesson about early gaming PCs, starting with August Personage:
The C64 was pretty much the computer to have if you wanted to play computer games in the ’80s, with the possible exception being the Apple II series. I know I’ve seen a number of people say “Nintendo saved the video game industry after the Atari crash,” but that’s an odd statement considering how popular C64s, Apple IIs, Atari 400/800/ST/etc., and even Amigas were for gaming at the time. There seems to be this perception that after the Atari 2600 stopped selling, all gaming just halted except for arcades, which is patently untrue. I’d argue it was one of the best eras for game development, as it was still very new and no one had pre-conceived notions about what could and couldn’t be done. That led to some great games.