Phil gives a flowery review of the entertaining things that keep him up at night. I briefly played Railroad Tycoon, dubbed the “train game” by Jacob, but never really got into it. Like Phil, I had a hard time deducing the economic influences. I have corn, they want it; they have oil, I want it. Why isn’t this the most profitable freight line in American history?
Civ 4 is an incredibly fun game. I don’t really share Phil’s problems with the interface. They’re niggling at best. The only real problem I have is that it crashes constantly. In an era where patches are found on the website the day of a game’s release, I’m not sure in which way it’s more telling that such a bug fix patch wasn’t out. It is definitely telling, in a very specific way, however, that when a patch was released, it caused more crashes than ever before. You see, before what would normally happen is that the game would crash when trying to display an animation about a wonder having been completed. The pyramids, the Sistine Chapel, etc. It seems to happen more often in longer-running games, probably due to the massive memory leaks that are obvious due to degrading gameplay performance and especially evident when quitting and the entire Windows operating system swaps back in. Because the game is smart in that it autosaves every few minutes and that it’s easy enough to turn these animations off, this wasn’t a big problem for me in the original version. After installing the patch though, it began to affect my actual gameplay. At one point I was in the middle of an epic war with the Japanese for domination of my continent. Unfortunately I had to replay that epic a good six or seven times until I noticed that it kept crashing as I finished the Hanging Gardens world wonder, and then try to permute things with enough entropy to get the game to continue. This route was a complete failure, and I had no choice but to abandon its development. A foreign society then discovered it and I lost all its wonderous health and happiness benefits. I, Isabella, Queen of the Spaniards, then took out my anger on a weakened Japanese civilization that simply had no chance.
But for all my bitching about the crashes — and it does crash much more often than the average application — it is still a wonderful diversion from the stresses of modern life, like, where am I going to order takeout from tonight, and oh no, i forgot to recharge my portable sonic toothbrush.