Jolt Country

I have reduced my gameplaying activities to virtually nothing but “galactic conquest games”.

Last time, you heard me speak about Mayhem Intergalactic, a small indie title which takes the space 4X game and reduces it to its base elements, providing a galactic conquest experience in under 30 minutes, sometimes even under 15. A far cry from the hours-long commitments required by “deeper”, more complex 4X games.

Today I present to you a game that takes the experience offered by Mayhem Intergalactic, removes the “Next Turn” button, cranks it up to real-time, and distills the 4X experience even further, down to an explosion of action and, yes, strategy which takes less than 5 minutes, and often much less than that.

That game is: GALCON!

The description of the game is not unlike that of Mayhem Intergalactic, or of any other space 4X game. You start with a planet, and try to expand your empire to other planets, each of which offers a different production potential, building a space army of space ships and space lasers to send to your enemy’s space planets to try to conquer them. But whereas 30 seconds into your normal 4X game you would still be scrolling around the screen, getting your bearings, your first tenuous thoughts of overall strategy just barely forming in your mind, and maybe you’ve moved your cursor over to your home planet and are considering pressing the “build a ship” button.

30 seconds into a game of GALCON, the screen will be engulfed in the FIERY FLAMES OF SPACE ARMAGEDDON, with hundreds of little Asteroids mans coursing through the galaxy, exploding in droves as they attempt to conquer the opposing players’ empires.

It’s often exhilirating and even hilarious to watch, as it embraces glorious excess, and the “explosion” sound (which is the sound of someone making an “explosion sound” into a microphone) rattles around as the rhythmic undertone of the whole undertaking.

It sounds, and often feels, ridiculous. But really, when you get down to it, it still manages to be a strategy game, even as your mouse is flitting frantically around the screen trying to launch your armadas one second to the next.

When you win, you really feel like you executed a superior strategy, not that you just were able to drag and drop ships faster. And when you lose, you feel like you could do better the next time, not by mousing quicker, but by making better decisions.

So either it’s a tremendously strategic action game, or just the most frantic damn strategy game you’ll ever see.

It offers online multiplayer play, so if you happen to try the single player version out and are as charmed by it as I was, and want to try it online, I will meet you there.

Note from Ice Cream Jonsey:

Friend,

Long have I awaited thy coming of age. Our town of Detroit doth slowly wither under the cursed sorcery of Mangar, spawn of demons. Many hath challenged his power, only to encounter their doom.

One man didst nearly succeed. Matt Millen, the former general manager of the Detroit Lions, became imprisoned here through Mangar’s evil spell of winter. He failed, but in his failure lies the way to thy victory. Millen did keepeth a journal, and Mangar is either unaware of its existence, or believes it to have perished along with the impudent viscount. But the tome didst survive, and came into my keeping.

The path thou must follow doth with danger abound. Go, and take with thee the journal of a brave knight, and the prayers of an old man.

(signed) the dark and gritty… Ice Cream Jonsey!

-=[oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo]=-

From the Journal of Matt Millen

It is not to be tolerated! I refuse to kneel to the evil that has made its home in Detroit.

All of the brave knights who protect this town have vanished, leaving frightened serfs, women and children to face unprotected the hordes of strange beasts and ruffians that now inhabit the streets. My brave party and I can do little to reduce their seemingly infinite numbers.

We must destroy the wizard Mangar, surely the source of the evil invasion, and of the ungodly and impenetrable winter that imprisons Detroit.

-=[oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo]=-

The Sewer  

We are in a muck-drenched stinking sewer, and the beasts and blackguards who attack us here are too numerous to be described. Here we gain much wealth, and our skills are honed like fine steel blades. As we explore, we discover strange writings on the walls of this foul hole. I will record them faithfully here — their value will perhaps become clear later in our travels.

        “Pass the light at night.” A cryptic verse indeed. I believe I will take this advice to heart, and embrace my recent hirelings: Charles Rogers, Mike Williams, and Joey Harrington. We shall pass much, indeed.

        “YM EBD SI A RCAERAC.” I am no scholar, but neither am I a stranger to lore and letters. I can perceive no sense here.

        “Golems are made of stone.” Is this meant to lighten our hearts against a fear of encountering a golem made from the draft picks I could have received for trading the mentally-defeated Barry Sanders while he could still perform, instead of stubbornly holding on and robbing America of the joy of watching him play?

We shall venture further into the maze.

-=[oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo]=-

Harkyn’s Castle, Level Three

We encountered a doddering old fool who barred our path until we told him the name of the tavern on Archer Street. The answer, Naked Tavern, was found to be disquieting to some members of our party, though not Joe Cullen.

Ah, pride before a fall. Once again we are challenged to the utmost of our abilities, and emerge not unscathed. The Internet trolls! They attacked in an endless flowing stream, to slay them akin to holding back the tide with a bottomless bucket. We found out (too late!) that our recently abandoned green robes my own seppuku, my own life taken from my own hands using a sword that I alone pushed into my wheezing abdomen, would have rendered us immune to attack. At last we stumbled, blind with weariness, over hundreds of corpses, four of our, proud, slain warriors (Robert Porcher, Roy Williams, Jon Kitna and Jason Hanson) lying hidden beneath stinking mounds of Baron Harkyn’s dead legions. We can spare no time to hunt for them — may the gods forgive us.

-=[oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo]=-

Mangar’s Dungeon, Level Five

We are defeated at the last. The silver shapes were the key to entering the main chamber wherein resides a gloating Mangar. We are trapped like rats in a tiny room where even now the wizard sends his minions to storm the door.

But we are given wise counsel by Charles Rogers, who advises us to try to get this journal to Clark Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, and an expert in the futility of a general manager in his own right… in the hope that he will pass on the experiences written here to one capable of defeating Mangar and firing Carl Peterson. One final spell, cast by Mike Williams, using the life forces of Charles Rogers, Marty Mornhinweg, Kevin Jones and myself, will render Joey Harrington invisible for a time, enabling him to escape this place with the journal. Yet it is evil magic. Everything we have accomplished will be rent from the fabric of time and destroyed, and as the spell burns itself out, Joey will be consumed.

I embrace my companions, and taste the salt of Joey’s tears. Mike Williams has asked for my dagger — he has no wish to be captured alive. As he prepares the spell, I can but reflect that no man could wish to die in better company.

Mike begins. They come.

Given our experience with the game the past few weeks, obviously it was a horrendous oversight that DEFCON was left out of both my Top 10 Games of All Time list, and Jonsey’s Top 100 Games lists. 

Let’s figure out where it belongs!

Here’s my original top 10 list:

10. Pyro II
9. NetHack
8. Super Mario 64
7. Grand Theft Auto III
6. Infocom Game
5. Warcraft III
4. Asteroids
3. Far Cry
2. Rollercoaster Tycoon
1. Civilization IV / GalCiv 2

Where do you put DEFCON, a stylistically brilliant, flawless execution of a fast, simple, yet deceptively deep and engrossing strategy game that anyone can play and enjoy, particularly if you were young and impressionable circa 1983?

I look at #4 and I realize, no, I can’t put anything else above Asteroids at this phase of the game. So, that’s the “ceiling”.

Would I trade my experience with WC3 (or the upcoming SC2, which will immediately go to the top of this list) for DEFCON? Ehh. No. WC3 had such a great feel to it, and was so entertaining for so long, that I just don’t think a game as simple as DEFCON can beat it, no matter how unbelievably cool it is.

I’d take it over Pyro II, so it’s up to 10 at least. FUCK YOU PYRO II.

I’d never play Nethack again if I could keep my precious DEFCON. You’re out, HACK!

Super Mario? An amazing experience! That’s a tough one. It basically comes down to who would win in a fight, Mario or Matthew Broderick. Gotta go with Brods. LATER MARIO.

Man. I’m so sick of the fucking GTA games that I really feel like knocking it down too. But until you get sick of them, wow, right? Hmm. Sprawling, unlimited freedom, or a strategy game with like 3 buildings and 5 other units. Know what? Hooray for the little guy. GRAND THEFT FUCK OFF.

So, Infocom or DEFCON? Eh. I can’t deny my roots like that. ‘Com beats ‘CON.

So there you have it.

DEFCON is the 7th best game of all time.

On Jonsey’s list it should be #23.

Castle Crashes is a new little beat-em-up for the Xbox 360. And I would totally get it. There are only two real problems. The first is that I now have a 360 backlog. I want to finish Braid. I want to get… er, farther in Space Giraffe. I haven’t even seen 5% of what there is in Dead Rising. I also purchased Bionic Commando: Rearmed, because people over at Caltrops seemed to be having fun with it.

A backlog! On a system I just bought. This is in addition to the non-gaming backlog around there, which involves getting a vacuum cleaner that works more than three times (seriously, it’s easier to fucking kill Dracula than it is to buy a reliable vacuum cleaner in this country) addressing the fact that my cat has turned every wooden surface into his own personal scratching post (if we did kill Dracula at home, this cat would be disintegrating the stake in like two minutes) and finding a permanent solution to the orb spider-brimming hedges in the front lawn (orb spiders attract bats, which, well, you can see where I am going with this).

I don’t think that there is a chance that the Castle Crashers devs are reading this, but if they do encounter this post, I’d just like to say that the game is adorable, is a very amusing button masher in a world it never knew, and — from the demo – it definitely seems to be worth fifteen bucks. No question.  

There’s been some discussion about the higher prices for Xbox Live Arcade games, and honestly, since I purchase the “points” in $25 blocks, as long as the games aren’t costing more than that, I don’t care. If they get to be like $30, then I — the gamer! — have to step up and buy fifty bucks worth of Xbox Points, and I’d like to start a family someday. That ain’t going to happen if I find myself having long conversations about “Xbox Points,” for Christ’s sake. So, anyway, when I get sick of one of the other 360 games I have, Castle Crashers is next, and that’s the highest praise I can give a demo. (There are also some problems with on-line play, so this gives me and them some time to work on our issues.)

The other thing I had for this post, which isn’t specific to CC (which lets you play a long time in demo mode) was regarding just how little time you get in the demo for Robotron 2084. Maybe it’s just because the game is ridiculously addicting, but it stops after the second level, which even a hoof-handed sped like me can get through. I can’t keep going back to the demo because I am going to drop five bucks on the game “just to have it” on the 360. Yet, the 360 gamepad’s analog controllers are frigging primed for Robotron. I must have ten systems that will play Robotron. If they had let you play a couple more levels into it, I’d remember how terrible I am at the game and this feeling would deflate, but they are far too clever for that. So, good, although evil, work with that demo, too.

Is it “Risk in space”, or is it the 4X genre stripped down to its core? Ultimately, you may wind up asking yourself if those two aren’t the same questions.

Here is an indie gem which presents a game that is both too simple and yet too rewarding to resist. If you are a Risk fan (which I generally am not) you will feel right at home, as the dynamic of capturing territory with each territory providing more units with which to capture more territory is essentially the core of the gameplay. Likewise, if you are a fan of Master of Orion or Galactic Civilizations, you will also find yourself in comfortable environs, and after you come to grips with the fact that it doesn’t have any (any) of the complexity that comes with those gargantuan undertakings, gosh it sure does feel familiar.

The fact is, this is 4X reduced as far as it can be reduced. Lookit:

You have explore: the planets DO have a relative value to be discovered, in terms of how many base units they create.

You have expand: you use your spaceships to conquer neighboring (or not so neighboring) planets.

You have exploit: use your empire to build up an unstoppable force.

You have exterminate: you kill everyone else to win.

Christ, you even have technology upgrades, but in Mayhem Intergalactic, as you might expect, there’s only one upgrade you can make. But it’s there!

And is the joy of winning a 15-minute game of MI really that much less than the satisfaction of tearing around the universe in a 20-hour GC marathon? Try it for yourself, but I sure wasn’t convinced.

On top of that, this is just one of those indie titles that you want to get behind. Developed by one guy, put out there, priced maybe a little too high, but he’s right there, developing updates, doing beta test programs, responding to every request and suggestion that comes his way — dude cares, man. And though he didn’t pick the most challenging of all genres to tackle, he at least cared enough to get it right, and to keep working on it.

I dunno, it’s just a “feel good” title to me. And even if you’re scoffing the whole time, don’t tell me after playing the demo for a half hour or so that you didn’t have a good time.

I begrudgingly purchased Tiger ‘09, still smarting from the horrid experience that was Tiger ‘08, but hoping against hope that at least some of the “this one is much better than the last one” reviews weren’t just corporate buttsucking.

With about six hours of playtime under the rapidly-expanding waistline, then, here will now present to you my preliminary review of Tiger ‘09, played on an Xbox 360.

Here are the things that are better than last years!

- The little bubble that shows you how you’re actually moving the joystick in “real swing” mode or whatever it’s called.

- The graphics are a little better.

- The player stats, although suspicious, are “dynamic”, in that your abilities (distance/short game/putting, etc.) go up and down based on your performance, rather than however it worked before, which I forget, but which I think was a lot more static — you’d build your stats in the training section, and those’d be your stats.

- You can’t tell whether you miss or make a putt based on the camera angle it immediately switches to. I can’t tell you how annoying this was. In ‘08, if it went to the “behind the golfer” view, you knew you’d missed, and if it went to “behind the cup” view, you knew you’d made it. Now at least there’s a little tension as the ball rolls to the cup.

- I like the new Tiger Challenge mode. In ‘08, you’d have to complete a specific set of tasks to get to a “boss” match. Now you can pick and choose among a bunch of tasks, each of which has a point value, so as long as you collect enough points, you get to the boss, regardless of how you collect those points.

- Thusfar it has yet to alter history.

- Seems some of the courses have been replaced with other ones, and a couple of the new ones seem pretty money.

Here are the things that are worse than last year!

- Gary McCord and David Feherty have been replaced by the deadly dull Sam Torrance and the racist lesbian Kelly Tilghman. However, since the announcers are completely useless anyway (see below), you’re almost relieved that the good names of McCord and Feherty need suffer no more indignities in the name of this godforsaken franchise.

- The Hank Haney training system, where the personality-less Haney suggests training exercises to give you a temporary skill boost, seems completely pointless at best, and totally boring at worst. Or the other way around. Anyway, the training exercises are so painfully dull that the minor temporary boost you’d get in skill is never, ever worth it, and it becomes just another screen to skip.

- Seems even slower than last year, which was already very slow, in terms of loading times.

Here are the things that are just as bad as last year

- The announcers still appear to have no idea what is going on on the course. Moreover, when they are spouting their nonsense which has no apparent relationship to what’s going on on the screen, their grammar now appears to be suffering on top of it.

- Opponent golfers still suffer unbelievable lapses in concentration, and will intentionally line up directly at a tree, fire a ball at it and hit it square, as if they thought the goal of the game was to kill as many woodpeckers as possible within a certain time limit.

- You, yourself, appear to have no idea what is going on either. You will wildly celebrate one-inch putts, and flail around disgustedly when your 280-yard 3 wood misses the green by a foot. You also complain about par a lot.

These three, listed above, continue to amaze me. With all of the advanced technology and multi-zillion dollars that go into these things, for some reason they STILL can’t figure out how to interpret what is going on. I don’t see how it’s that hard. if (distance to pin < previous_distance * .04) celebrate(); if (putt_goes_in and putt_length > 8 feet) fist_pump();. This is NOT DIFFICULT LOGIC TO IMPLEMENT. if (shot_is_really_close_to_green and shot_length_was_over_200_yards) do_not_whine_and_penalize_your_short_game_stats_for_fucks_sake();

I just don’t see why they can’t, or won’t, fix this.

- Still way, WAY too easy. On hard, I’m already breaking 60, and have won every tournament I’ve entered, by a decent margin.

… So, that’s it, at least for now. As a “hardcore golf simulation” (as which some article or another laughably referred to the Tiger EA franchise) it still sucks moose tits. It is still a bad golf game. But it is a better bad golf game than last years, which was horrendous and inexcusable.

So, you know. I guess it’s fine. And ultimately, it’s as good as we’re gonna get.

=(

I have completed the game (with the exception of some secret, hidden content I’m now learning about from the Intertubes), and so will now present a NON-SPOILER REVIEW. I will start another thread on the BBS for SPOILER-FILLED ANALYSIS.

It says something about the game that it warrants both a review and an analysis thread, a fact which is itself part of the review..

Anyway! BRAID NON-SPOILER REVIEW

#0: Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor (2008)

As I said before, this list is “genre based”, in that I tried to make sure that no basic gaming genre ended up with more than one entry. Whether this was a wise decision or one which ultimately renders the list pointless, I will let the pundits and historians argue over for time immemorial. Is it a travesty that I left off such definite top-10 material as Half-Life, Robotron: 2084, and Barbie Fashion Show? Of course. But I don’t care, because I am HOUSE.

However, I did have a tough time picking the 4X winner. As much admiration as I have for the Civ games, the fact is that there is one 4X game which I have played far more, and enjoyed far more, than any other, and it is Galactic Civilizations.

As much as I wanted to, though, I couldn’t, with any sense of integrity as a gaming expert, pick GC, because the fact is that when it was released in 2003, it was already way behind the times.

You could only play as one race (humans). Lots of other races in the game, but you could only play as that one. No multiplayer. No ship design — there were a handful of stock ships you could research, but that was all you got. The very thought of releasing a space 4X game with a straight face, in 2003, with these limitations, is almost inconceivable.

And yet, it was the most fun 4X game I’ve ever played. I loved it primarily for two reasons:

1. Even with the aforementioned limitations, it still had a perfect blend of style, panache, and charm that no other 4X game had ever matched. There was still a depth to it, multiple victory routes, a robust trading and diplomacy system, but it was all done so smoothly, with such great humor and obvious love, that it was even more impossible to put down than the most state-of-the-art 4X games. The game’s complexity was masked by a uniquely well-designed UI and a lighthearted (but not cartoonish) touch which made just one more turn way too compelling. And though it was clearly an independently developed game, the quality level was strikingly high. The graphics weren’t going to wow anybody, but too they weren’t a giveaway that it was an indie game. And it still has the best, most memorable orchestral soundtrack of any game I know.

2. I gained most of my GC experience while living in Boulder, CO, without a job, and recovering from getting my tits lopped off. Of course, now I’m so fat that they’ve grown back again, so the entire thing was a waste of time and money, but what was NOT a waste of time and money were the drugs that I was prescribed for the post-operative pain. These were Percoset and Ambien, to be taken together, and friends, to say that playing GC on Percoset and Ambien is the most fun thing ever is not an understatement. Of course, neither is it an understatement to say that anything you do while on Percoset and Ambien is the most fun thing ever, so this perhaps skewed my opinion somewhat.

No matter, it was definitely my favorite 4X game — my favorite computer game — ever.

Now, I put it away for a while, and waited patiently for Galactic Civilizations II to come out. Which it eventually did, in 2006. This was an important milestone, because GC2 finally brought the franchise into the 90s, adding such not-quite-obsolete-yet features as being able to play other races, being able to design ships, and introducing “3D” graphics, letting you rotate and zoom the map however you’d like.

This was all very exciting, and yet… something was wrong. For all of the new additions, something seemed to have been taken away. There was more to do, but doing it seemed clunkier. You could rotate and zoom the map, but it didn’t seem to add anything except slower framerates and difficulty finding a layout that made the map as easy to read as the old 2D map in the original game. The 3D ships looked clunky and added nothing. The humor and charm still seemed to be there, but even that part of the implementation seemed rough, unfinished. And you could play as any race, but all that seemed to change is what color the border around the screen was, and how your ships looked.

In short, it made me miss GalCiv. And that upset me so much that I just disavowed the franchise entirely.

Until!

On April 30, 2008, Stardock released Twilight of the Arnor, the second expansion pack for GC2. I hadn’t bought the first expansion, and certainly was not going to get this one. That’s when the reviews started showing up, claiming that this was no mere expansion pack. This was to be the last offering in the GC2 line, and the developers just went insane trying to put everything they could possibly manage into it, knowing it would have to hold off GC fans for at least a few years until GC3 came around.

I so much wanted to love this franchise again. I so much wanted to give it another chance. So finally, I caved.

So friends, here is the verdict:

Holy fucking shit.

To call this an expansion pack really does not tell the story. Much more accurate would be to call it Galactic Civilizations 2.5. You have to understand what they did here:

- All races now have their own tech tree and look/feel. That’s 12 different tech trees for 12 different races and 12 different themes. That is frigging huge. Now there is a reason to play other races, and feel like you’re not just playing the Red guy or the Green guy.

- The entire graphic engine was overhauled. The map all of a sudden seems to jump to life, and the ships have all been overhauled to look, there’s no other way to put it, bad ass.

- The UI has undergone countless changes and now runs smoother than a roll-on deodorant. Ship design is still available, but now the computer will design them for you if you don’t feel like having to micromanage that stuff.

- All of the wit and whimsy shines through more magnificently than ever.

- Ladies and gentlemen, the FUN is BACK.

And when the fun is back in the GC world, that can only mean one thing:

Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor is the 0th best game of all time.

(And the music is still fabulous.)

#1: Civilization IV (2005)

My history with the Civilization games is checkered at best. I remember when the original first came out. I was right there in line to buy it the day it was released. I bought it along with another game which I don’t remember. I brought them both home and started playing the other game. I hadn’t even opened Civilization when Doug “Finsternis” Linder came over, saw the box, said “I’ve heard this is really good, can I borrow it?” and I said sure.

He left with the box that night, and I never got it back. I didn’t much care, either. I’ve had a lifelong ego struggle with this man, and even back then I knew that if there was something he liked so much that I couldn’t get even a borrowed copy back from him, it certainly wasn’t anything I wanted anything to do with. So I missed it. That’s okay, I didn’t even know what a “4X” game was.

To the uninitiated: “4X” refers to “explore, expand, exploit, exterminate”, a type of strategy game in which you generally find yourself in the middle of a large, unknown map, then set about 1) exploring the area, 2) building cities or military units in order to expand the amount of territory and resources you control, 3) wash, rinse, repeat until you’ve blown up all the competing players or otherwise found a way to victory or defeat.

My very first experience with a 4X game would come later, ironically with a much older game. I had to work late one night, just to monitor some overnight job for hours on end, and that same Doug “Finsternis” Linder handed me a worn, dogeared floppy disk with a game called Empire on it, and suggest I use that to while away the long, boring hours. Well, it had been years since he’d played it, so I figured that was enough time for the “Doug germs” to die and fall off of the game’s packaging, so I loaded that sucker up.

I started a game of Empire, and before I was able to finish it, and before I knew it, it was 3 AM and the job was over and it was time to go. I never went back to Empire because of the obsolete graphics and unwieldy user interface, and also because I could still smell some Doug on it, but one thing I learned that night was that the 4X genre was the finest, most addictive, most compelling genre of computer game that I would ever come across.

As an aside, I’d like to give you a sense of how terribly addictive this type of game can be. There is another venerable 4X franchise, set in space, called “Galactic Civilizations”. I was a huge fan of the first game and played it for countless hours while I was taking my year-and-a-half “finding myself” tour of the country. At the end of a game, if your score was high enough, you could have it automatically posted to the GalCiv website for all to see.

All I remember was that there was one guy, named “Technician”, who would play the game every single day, once a day, with the game set to the exact same settings every day — highest difficulty level, small galaxy, same number and type of enemies. He owned the first page or two of the all-time high score list. He had obviously mastered the game, at least with these (extremely difficult) settings, as he would win every single day. Not a loss on his record.

I looked back through the history, and he had been doing this for months. More than a handful of months, at that. Once a day. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening. Eventually I asked the guy, you’ve obviously mastered the game, you’re obviously never going to lose, why on Earth would you do this day after day, month after month?

He said, simply, he enjoyed it.

That’s how addictive it is.

Shortly after that first encounter with Empire, Empire Deluxe was released, and that remains to this day the only computer game I’ve ever faked an illness so I could stay home and play it the day after I got it.

I told Doug about my affinity for these games, and he suggested I go back and try Civilization, since it was, in his words, like “super-Empire”. I couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful, but still my repugnance for this man’s tastes and suggestions was stronger than my desire for a super-Empire game, so still I steered clear.

I would have to wait for Civilization II to truly get my first taste of the game that I bought and never played, lo those many years ago.

It was, truly, super-Empire. Turns and hours just melted away for weeks on end. It was, and still is, hard to believe that a game could have that strong a hold on a player for that much time. It truly is one of those games which just never gives you a reason to stop playing, all the way up until the game ends, which in Civ II’s case could have been 10-20 hours in the future. And then there’s not that much reason to not fire it right back up again.

Since those days, 4X games have come and gone, even another Civ game had come and gone. People didn’t like Civ III but at that time in my life I wasn’t playing games much, so I’m not sure why.

Then Civ IV came out and it was like that night with Empire all over again. I was under the spell again. The perfect gaming genre had won me over again. But this was different. You could fire up the worst 4X game in the world and it’ll still draw you in for a few hours before you realize how much it sucks. As my hours with Civ IV went on, though, it began to occur to me that this might not just be the best genre, but the perfect entry into it.

The graphics were, for the first time, not merely functional, but very beautiful. The lush landscapes seem to come alive on your screen in a way no 4X game has managed. In one of the more impressive special effects I’ve seen in any game of any kind, you may seamlessly zoom in to a single city square, and hear all of the bustle and music within the city, and then zoom back out again so far that you are floating in the solar system, seeing and rotating the entire globe, hearing nothing but wind and emptiness. Sure, you can’t hear wind in space, that’s not the point. Does it affect the strategy or game design? No. Does it finally raise the 4X genre to the level of art?

Absolutely, and with poetic flourish.

The rest of the game is similarly polished and wonderful. World Wonders, when accomplished, bring back the little movies from Civ II, but this time fully computer-generated and magnificent. Leonard Nimoy’s voice resonates with the perfect balance of studiousness and whimsy. The icons are all clear. Everything you need to know about the game is no more than two mouse clicks away. Everything is spelled correctly. Search the game from nook to cranny, and everything is just right.

On the gameplay front, 4X has never been deeper. It is not just about territory. Layers upon layers of shifting power overlay the landscape, offering countless ways to “expand and exploit”, from religion, to cultural influence, to economic power, to resource monopolization. It is like several games in one, all being played at the same time, and all brutally effective at sucking away your time and brainpower.

And they even managed to make the gameplay smoother than all of the predecessors. Games are mercifully shorter now, without losing any of the punch.

This is the desert island game, the last and only game you will ever need. You will never be done with it, and the only way to lose is to stop playing. Everything else is endlessly joyous, endlessly fun, and essentially flawless.

Civilization IV is the greatest game of all time.

#2: Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999)

Before there was Mall Tycoon, and Zoo Tycoon, and Crackhouse Tycoon, and Auschwitz Tycoon, there was Rollercoaster Tycoon. Let me start the review with the end of the review, which is that there still has never been a better “building” game, and RCT does what it does with such perfection, freedom, and joy, that it shakes free from the bonds of its own genre to become one of the greatest games in history (some would say, the second best.)

But besides all that, it’s important to point out that RCT is one of two games, along with Microsoft Flight Simulator, which actually changed my life in a non-trivial way.

The background is that I’d loved coasters as a child, and spent significant chunks of time “designing” and drawing coasters wherever I could, on blackboards, in the margins on papers, on book covers, etc. Something about the mixture of the elegant curves of the structure, along with the promise of fun and excitement, just spoke to me. The family’s yearly trip to Kings Dominion was the highlight of my young life. I wanted to be a roller coaster when I grew up.

Then, something happened, I grew up, I left home, and coasters just disappeared from my life.

In 1999, my coworker Justin and I saw a downloadable demo and (on company time and equipment), installed it and fired it up. We both sat there transfixed, fiddling with the controls, realizing that, holy crap, this would actually let you build the coasters you had rolling around in your head all these years. Seems he was in the same boat, and something about this game was rekindling flames which once burned brightly in our youths but were sadly extinguished. We vowed that day to go out and buy the game the day it was released. And we did.

Many, many hours were spent with the game that weekend. That’s the point where we realized that Six Flags Great Adventure was just down the road, and after not having had the joy of clickety-clacking up a lift hill for far too many years, we got our ride on in a big way.

And, man, that was it. We were both gleefully, immaturely hooked all over again. This newly re-found obsession culminated in a two week trip spanning most of the northeast quadrant of the country, and the enjoyment of over 120 different coasters all over the US in about a two-year span. Coasters were my life, all over again, and it was a time which I will always remember fondly, and which was just too much fun to begin to describe.

And all of that can be traced directly back to this game, which reminded me of one of the great loves of my life.

None of that is enough to qualify it for being the second best game of all time, though. What IS enough, is that it is about a hundred games in one, and manages to do them all superbly, and tie them together into a magnificent whole, with unlimited replay, and unlimited capacity for creative expression and, damn it all to hell, fun.

The coaster building part was revolutionary. The economic model was perfect. The animations and individual tracking of thousands of park visitors was astounding. The pathway design, park decoration, theme building, landscaping, and advertising parts, all perfectly able to occupy hours of time on their own, were nothing but beautiful, in terms of UI design, pacing, variety, graphics, sound, all of it. The game world is a huge canvas, full of unlimited potential, onto which your only job was to paint a good time.

And that’s the last thing which makes RCT special. It is one of the few games that have been purely about fun, and in which nothing bad could ever happen. Look at the other games in this list. In one way or another, they are all about killing something, or not getting killed, or avoiding disaster, or blowing something up, or struggling through obstacles, etc, etc. This is the case for 99% of all games ever, as far as I can tell. RCT had none of that. The worst that could happen was, other than a little nausea, people would be sad that you didn’t have rides they wanted to ride on. Nobody to kill, nobody to be killed, no treasures to protect. The purpose of the game was to generate as much fun and joy as you could. If you didn’t do well, you only generated a little joy. If you excelled, you created much joy. The currency of the game was fun and excitement. Even the granddaddy, SimCity (which could have very well been on this list itself), forced you to deal with things like crime, and fire, and natural disasters, and pollution.

RCT’s world, and its gameplay, were a perfect respite for all of life’s struggles and ills. You had fun creating fun. There was really no way to lose. The ultimate tool for putting a smile on your face.

The fact that it did everything so goddamn great was just a bonus.