As I get older I’ve have a tendency to stay away from video games as I know just how addictive they can be. Coming from a semi-hardcore World of Warcraft from vanilla player, I know how it is to step away from the world of pixels and get back in touch with reality. It was with much soul-searching that I managed to delete my entire Blizzard account last year.
It’s a good thing then that modern games just don’t grip me anymore. Sure, there’s some superb game cinematics now, but if I wanted to watch a movie I would do so. They reason I still love Counterstrike is the sense of nostalgia I get with it; all those endless nights playing on a 56k modem connection, having no understanding of recoil, and calling anyone with lots of headshots a hacker…..
Even when I purchased my PS4 last year to play on Rainbow Six with my colleagues, the grip wasn’t there anymore, and it wasn’t long before I put down the gamepad and let the PS4 just gather dust. The Division came along, but that was ruined by all the bugs in it, and I just don’t have the time of energy to grind for gear which only lasts until the next expansion.
Civilization VI
I put my hand up and admit I’m a geek when it comes to games. I love playing the sims genre (not The Sims!), and I’ve owned every iteration of SimCity, Colonization (remember that?!), Football Manager even when it was called Championship Manager, and Civilization. So it was with much anticipation that I got the latest and greatest of them all, Civilization VI.
Oh…..my….God….
This game is one huge time sink. Load it up and at least 6 hours of your life will have disappeared. Forget the dinner date, feeding the dog, or even sleep, this game just draws you to have just one more turn to develop a new tech, build a new city, attack another player, etc.
Civ VI is just uber polished, and the amount of information and difficulty has increased several folds over it predecessor. There’s just so much things going on, it takes several games for you to absorb it all. I won’t go into the details here of the mechanics, but suffice to say Civ VI will keep you occupied for days……scratch that, Imeant years.
With games like Civilization, I tend to start off with a custom game involving lots of resources, huge continental maps, and only one single AI enemy, so that I can get into the flow and learn the basics, whilst normally still winning the game. This turned out to be a disaster on my first attempt on Civ VI when my beloved PC decided I will play against Ghandi. For those that ever played the previous version of Civilization will know that, in the game, Ghandi is a moany cow and is one of the most irritating characters about. Well, the developers have upped the ante here. As I go to the year 2010, I got my cities to start manufacturing tanks to take on my enemies. Half way through my hostile takeovers, Ghandi asked for truce, and I thought that was a good idea so I could regroup my forces for the end attack. That turned out to be a stupid idea as Ghandi then flooded my cities with apostles of his religion, turned all my population’s beliefs into his, and I subsequently lost my first game. The git……
My second game didn’t go much better as I was pitted against some German block who hated anyone making friends with city states. I didn’t heed this warn as I made friends all over the map, only to have the Germans blitzkrieg my cities……git.
Civ VI is just one monster of a game. I’ve read that some users have actually coded a map of the real world for Civ VI and it several gigabytes in size. How many sim games have you had that has a benchmark test built in? My results came out as 16ms for something, I guess that’s decent enough……
