Posts Tagged ‘Sid Meier’
2K Games announces Civilization IV: The Complete Edition
If you missed out on Sid Meier’s Civilization IV the first time around, today is your lucky day — 2K Games has recently announced the forthcoming release of Civilization IV: The Complete Edition.
Civ IV: The Complete Edition will include the original game along with the Warlords, Beyond the Sword, and Colonization expansions all offered for a modest $39.99.
Expect this bundle to go on sale May 12th.
Press release after the break. More »
Sid Meier’s Pirates Game!–Repetitious Fun For All
It was one of my favorite original Xbox games, and now, thanks to the joy that is Xbox Live, one of my favorite Xbox 360 games. It’s Sid Meier’s Pirates, and it’s a whole load of easy, casual fun.
It’s kind of hard to say that a console title can be casual too–but Sid Meier’s Pirates definitely qualifies. You play as a young man who watched his family be sold into slavery along with all their assets following the disastrous wreckage of its merchant fleet. As you grow into young adulthood, the memory of this injustice sears into your very soul and you set out to recover your family and their fortune. Not to mention get revenge on the man responsible for it all, the evil Marquis.
There are a host of different ways to play Sid Meier’s Pirates–you can follow the main quest, and go hunting down the Marquis via a series of hints from mysterious strangers in taverns. You can try to find your lost family. You can turn bounty hunter and go after the notorious top ten pirates cruising the Caribbean, including legends like Jack Rackham, Captain Kidd and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach himself (bonus kudos to Sid Meyer and staff for INCLUDING the lengths of burning slowmatch that Teach would plait in his beard to give himself a glowing, smoke-shrouded appearance). Or you can just run amok and turn pirate yourself, ransacking cargo vessels and treasure ships all along the Spanish main. And if you can get an island’s governor to give you a letter of marque, it’s even technically legal! It’s true–it’s called “privateering”, and as long as you go after the shipping of countries that the country that issued you the letter of marque is at war with, you can’t be tried as a pirate.
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Civilization: Revolution Review–Beer And Pretzels At Their Best
With all the strangeness going on on the geopolitical front these days, it’s nice that, sometimes, you can still find some international politicking that makes sense. And leave it to Sid Meier to produce it with his game Civilization: Revolution.
In Civilization: Revolution, you’re out to become Ruler of the World by selecting a nation, as headed by one of its great mythical figures. For instance, when playing as America, you’re led by Abraham Lincoln. India is headed by no less than the Mahatma Gandhi himself, France is helmed by Napoleon Bonaparte, and so on. From there, you’ll take your country of choice through the stone age all the way up to space exploration while trying to control the world through force of arms, through the sheer glory of your culture, through the glories of science by being the first civilization to develop space travel and reach Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighboring star system, or even through sheer force of economic might. Along the way, you’ll make alliances, make trade deals, fend off belligerent neighbors, and develop your own technological prowess to make yourself the super power you secretly long to be.
There’s definitely a lot to love about this game. Beginners will get plenty of instructional help in the form of cartoonish advisors who show up on a regular basis and chip in their two cents about how your nation should be run. You’ll have science advisors and economic advisors, cultural and military advisors. You will not long for advice to help you through in the earliest stages of the game.
You’ll also have a panoply of game modes and options, including pre-built civilizations with specific growth targets in mind. The graphics are fun and entertaining, and the gameplay is smooth and easy to work with. It’s never an easy task to translate a PC title to console, so the sheer fact that there’s no reason to complain puts this ahead of a LOT of other titles. It’s very nicely done. There’s even a really great part of the game that kept my attention for hours—searching the planet. Once you get to the point where you can make seagoing vessels, you can literally search the planet for ancient civilizations and long-lost technologies and all sorts of nifty stuff like that. You’ll even get to find great places to settle satellite colonies, places near needed natural resources. I remember the joy I had managing to find a cannon battery when the whole world was still trying to figure out gunpowder. That cannon battery gave me a HUGE advantage, for a while.
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