By Japhy Grant

How-To Rule the World

I was going to devote this month's column to scary, creepy games to be all thematic until a press release slid across my desk one afternoon at OXO headquarters (which bears a striking resemblance to a desk piled with paper and used Mountain Dew cans) alerting me that Sid Meir's Civilization IV was being released two weeks early, Oct. 24 to be exact. Now, Dr. OXO, being the resourceful and modest guy that he is, managed to snag a prerelease copy, and this game is so good that I'm scrapping the ghosts and goblins to tell you about it.

The Civilization series is one of the longest running and respected franchises in the volatile history of video gaming. Throughout the seven or eight versions of the game (this includes spin-offs like Call to Power and Alpha Centauri), the game has pretty much stayed the same: You guide a tiny group of settlers from 4000 BC to the present, building up cities, armies and culture and destroying or making peace with your neighbors. Like most strategy-based games, the Civ series has always been a giant time sink; I lost many a night as a teenager crushing Teutonic empires with nuclear weapons. Each version has tweaked the basic formula, sometimes bringing the micromanaging of cities to such elaborate detail that it became tedious (nobody wants to play a game that involves levying tax incentives) or adding in new features like World Wonders or diplomacy.

After spending the last three days playing Civ IV, I can tell you it's an unqualified winner. The graphics are stunningly rendered in 3-D and the interface is very intuitive. The menu screen that dominated action in earlier versions is gone; you play on the map, much like Warcraft. Rather than receiving statistics about your army's defeat, you see them fall one by one. Religion is a feature that's always been present in the games, but has been greatly expanded this time around. You can chose to be part of many major religions (and some minor ones like Taoism) and build "holy cities" from which to proselytize. If you run into a neighbor who worships the same god you do, they'll be nicer to you, but the first thing I did was play the Arab civilization and launch a few jihads on my friends.

The other really impressive feature is the game's AI. When you encounter another civilization, you meet with their leader and, depending on who you're talking to, you'll get a different response. The first time I ran into France it was led by Louis XIV, who was pleasant and we got along famously, forging a pact to kill off the useless Incans. The second time I played, France was being run by Napoleon, who was pretty much interested in wiping my people from the face of the Earth. The characters look great; their semi-stylized 3-D animations are varied enough you never get bored and the diplomacy is more advanced so that you wind up relying on it more than your military, as opposed to versions past.

The game is only available for PC and fully supports multi-player. I heartily recommend you go out and grab a copy: Your ego deserves it.

Next Month: Gaming Gift Guide

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