|
Civilization Revolution DS: Looking into the Abyss
|
One Game Feature by Daniel Dujnic, 10/22/08
|
This must be prefaced with the fact that until Civilization Revolution DS I had never played a Civ game, although I had been warned of their potency. I'm sure the portable version is a pale shadow of the experience on a console or PC, but I cannot see how it could be any more addictive. I sometimes think I should have gotten the console version so my play time would have been limited to when the TV was available, but I know I would have just played in the living room in the wee hours of the morning. This might have been a touch better than playing it continuously from the office to the subway, to the store, all the way home, through dinner and into the night.
I should back up. Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy games that made its debut on consoles this year. You are a great leader of a historical society and it its your job to make your civ the mightiest civ through scientific advancements, cultural superiority, economic influence and military force. To say the least, a four hour bus ride has nothing on CivRevDS, it rips a hole in the space-time continuum, channeling you through time with war, peace, diplomacy and discovery, and then you're in Baltimore and you still haven't learned the Combustion tech.
A friend who is learned in the ways of the PC Civilization games asked me how many times I've missed my subway stop. The answer is five, once last week and four times in the same trip last month.
So I'm getting better. CivRevDS is the first game that made me taste what it would be like to be truly addicted to video games and how easy it would be for me to fall into the abyss. It sort of confirms what I knew was lurking just beneath the surface, a psyche that wants to delve into oblivion without a backward glance screaming a war cry to no one in particular. This reinforced self-awareness does nothing to bring back the lost hours of sleep, but it's doing wonders for my self-discipline. My current scheme for self-regulation is playing a single 'lightning round' game per day (30-45 min). In fact, I haven't played today yet; this could be the first day of the rest of my life.
Want to hear the best part? A lot of this sunken time is spent waiting for the computer to take it's turn. Late in the game (especially if you're playing on Deity difficulty) the wait between turns becomes at least 30 to 45 seconds. I've actually turned off my DS because I thought it had frozen while 'Waiting for other civs to take their turn.' I've seen what they do on these long turns, they just move the same Archer back and forth on a road for a full minute! The game is hopefully faster on the full-on consoles, but those SKUs probably have achievements, which would end my life.
I'll never get back those lost Sundays, but I also will never forget turning the culture-driven Gandhi into a fundamentalist military overlord whose influence ate nations from the inside and left them pitiful versions of themselves when the clock struck Five Turns Left. By the end he had the Americans and French begging for mercy, the Russians flailing uselessly in the north and the Arabs crying at the crossroads.
No really, this happened. I have the save file. I can show you the histogram.
|
       
'Looking into the Abyss'
|
|
#&rendershop#
|
