Slashdot reported today that Take Two Interactive has acquired the rights to the Civilization franchise and that they will be developing Civilization IV. According to their press release:

The fourth game in the PC strategy series that has sold over five million copies, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV is a bold step forward for the franchise, with spectacular new 3D graphics and all-new single and multiplayer content. Civilization IV will also set a new standard for user-modification, allowing gamers to create their own add-ons using the standard Python and XML scripting languages.

I’m disappointed.

Civilization II was a great game, not because the graphics were so good or because it could be modified, but because of its depth. It was (and arguably still is) the standard by which all other turn-based resource management games are judged. The graphics are primitive by today’s standards, true, but that doesn’t detract much from the game play. Unlike first person shooters, puzzle games, and even real time strategy games to some extent, the graphics in a resource management game are incidental to the game play, not part of it. They just need to be clear, accurate, and reasonably attractive. Graphics are not gameplay! This insistence on turning a game like Civilization into the next Doom 3 in order to appeal to the FPS crowd is folly. I want gameplay, not eye candy!

I reviewed the game Alpha Centuari here several years ago, and a few months later mentioned that I had decided not to try Civilization III because that game appeared to be yet another re-hash of Civilization II with fancier graphics. Subsequent reviews by other gamers bear that out: the game is pretty, but the game play hasn’t changed. What a huge waste of developer resources.

The last thing the Civilization franchise needs is another pretty game that has no substance. I play simulations because I’m interested in the simulation. I’m all for eye candy, but not at the expense of game play. Those two programmers who are slated to work on the 3D graphics engine should be re-tasked to work on the game AI. With reasonably bright AI helpers that get more intelligent as the civilization advances, players are freed to worry about higher-level things. As I said before: I want to manage an empire, not single-handedly construct every building and direct every battle.

With better AI assistants (like a city manager that can actually do a credible job of managing a city, and automated units that can be given specific tasks like interconnecting cities with roads rather than mindlessly “optimizing” random pieces of real estate), the game could provide a broader simulation, including advanced trade, more opportunities to interact positively with other civilizations, more domestic concerns, and much less focus on war. But if the game is going to focus on war, then at least give me the ability to direct a campaign and leave the individual battles to AI helpers. The game could be so much better if resources were spent on gameplay rather than on flashy graphics and a scripting engine.

What makes a turn based strategy game immersive is the depth of the simulation, not the attractiveness of its graphics. Add more elements to the simulation, create graphics that allow me to monitor those elements, and concentrate on balancing the gameplay. That is the recipe for a successful resource management game. Leave the cutting edge 3D rendering to the games that can actually benefit from it.

Since I posted my TriTryst pages, I’ve received a steady stream of messages about the game–mostly thanking me for posting the installation instructions for Windows 2000 and Windows XP.  Most interesting to me is that all but a handful of the messages are from women who say things like “TriTryst is the only computer game I play,” or “this game is my stress reliever, please help me get it working!”

Contrary to what many people think, women do play computer games.  They’re not terribly interested in first-person shooters, though, and many find resource management games like SimCity and Civilization too complex to be relaxing.  The women I know like puzzle games and pinball.  I see this not only in responses to TriTryst, but also in discussions I have from time to time.  Women prefer games like Bejeweled, Collapse, and Freecell that are simple, easy to understand and play, and not particularly stressful.  The problem for game developers is that women tend to find a game or two and play it for years—much different than teenage boys and men who play one first-person shooter after the other, always looking for the next coolest thing.  Game developers have been trying to tap into “the women market” for years with female protagonists in FPS-type games.  Instead, they should look at developing more engaging and more beautiful puzzle-type games.

I’ve been tinkering with SimCity 4 as I have time, which usually works out to a few hours one day or two during the week, and perhaps an extended period (4 or 5 hours) on a weekend if I’m lucky.  I’ve built and destroyed uncountable cities while trying different strategies.  I picked up a few hints on the official site, and a few more here and there on the Web.  But my cities keep getting to about 30,000 population, go into budget deficit, and nothing I do seems to turn that around.  I finally got hold of Prima’s SimCity 4 Strategy Guide, hoping that it would give me some strategies to try.

The book is terribly disappointing.  It’s a reference manual that describes the formulas used in the different parts of the simulation, and a recitation of the numerical effects of different actions in the game.  There are a few broad hints peppered throughout the text, but it’s not a strategy guide.  I was looking for more direct hints on city layout and proven strategies for dealing with the myriad details of the simulation.  To make matters worse, the book has many typographical errors, some incomprehensible descriptions of key points, and many examples of conflicting information.  Those errors aside, it’s a reasonably good reference, but hardly a strategy guide.

When I was at Fry’s on Thursday, I also picked up a copy of SimCity 4.  This was, perhaps, not the best idea I’ve ever had.  Why?  Because I get involved in resource management games.  I played Civilization II for over two years.  Railroad Tycoon II lasted at least that long.  Sure, I got annoyed with both games, but it took a long time for me to get tired of playing them.  SimCity 4 looks like it might keep me entertained for much longer than that.

I guess I’ve logged 10 or 12 hours playing with the game since Friday night.  At the moment, I’m pretty impressed.  The basic idea is easy enough:  you’re the mayor and it’s up to you to make the city grow.  You have to make it a place where people will want to live, make sure there’s enough power, police presence, fire protection, schools, and other infrastructure so that the city will prosper.  You have a limited budget, so you can’t just throw money at the problem (although you have to do that at the beginning).  After a few false starts, I finally got a working city (more of a town, actually, at the moment) whose budget is in the black.  There’s a lot to do in the game.  I had resisted the earlier SimCity versions because I was afraid I’d get stuck micro-managing every little part of city life in the same way that Civilization II and Raliroad Tycoon II make you micro-manage everything.  In SimCity, although you have the ability to micro-manage every little detail, it looks like you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.  You can set funding levels for individual items like schools and medical clinics, and things “just work”.  As the city grows, one of the game’s automated advisors will let you know if a service’s funding level needs to be adjusted.  So far, the micro-management doesn’t seem onerous, but again I’m just starting with the game.

In addition to individual cities, SimCity 4 also includes regions.  You’re given a map of the region, which is carved up into rectangular city-sized blocks.  You can create a city in each block, and form trading deals between the cities.  Apparently you can create a network of interdependent cities within a region, but the documentation is kind of sketchy in that area and I haven’t tried building an adjoining city to test it out.  I can see where region play would add a completely new dimension to the game.

My only gripes at the moment are performance.  The minimum system requirement is a 500 MHz Pentium with 128 MB of RAM and a 16 MB DirectX compatible video card.  The recommended configuration is a 1 GHz machine with 256 MB and a 32 MB Direct3D compatible video card.  My machine falls right in the middle there, and response time is a bit sluggish.  I figured I could turn down some of the graphics options (disable cloud and fog effects, for example) to save a few cycles.  That works, except that doing so ends up causing some really annoying rendering bugs—large portions of the screen go black, or get drawn with a bright green background.  The rendering bugs are way more annoying than the sluggish UI response.

My initial response to the game is very favorable.  I’ll report back here after I’ve had a bit more time to play with it.

Bejeweled, a game on the MSN Games site, is one of the best puzzle games I’ve ever played.  A client showed it to me about a year ago, and I spent some (okay, perhaps too much) time playing it then.  Now I go back to it periodically just to relax.  The game is simple to learn, easy to play, and very well balanced—not too easy and not too hard.  The authors did a fine job with the art and the animation, making it visually appealing without making it too busy.  You can also download a demo of the standalone game from the site.  The standalone game has the same basic game play, but the art and sounds are different, and the bonus scheme is changed.  If you’re tired of Solitaire and FreeCell, give Bejeweled a try.

Gamespot ran an article recently about abandonware games:  computer games that are no longer available through retail channels, and no longer marketed, distributed, or supported by the companies that published them.  The list of such games is long indeed, and includes TriTryst, the first game I ever wrote.  People are collecting the games and making them available for free over the Internet; a practice which has raised more than one eyebrow.  Software publishers insist that to do so is a violation of their copyrights.  Activist game junkies insist that, since the publishers have “abandoned” the titles, they have somehow relinquished their rights to control the distribution.  Some have gone so far as to suggest that copyright law be amended to include such a clause.  Most of the arguments are along the lines of “once you’ve let the cat out of the bag, you can’t put it back in.”  From my perspective, it looks like just another attempt at eliminating laws that protect intellectual property.

A common argument is that by making a protected work available the publisher incurs some public obligation, in perpetuity, to continue to make that work available regardless of financial considerations.  If the publisher decides to stop distributing the work, then it must release the work into the public domain, transfer the rights to somebody else, or in some other way continue to make the work available.  I disagree.  Strongly.  The creator of a work should, under the law, have full control over that work’s disposition.  The creator of a work (or those to whom he assigns rights), not “the public” has, and should continue to have, full control over the work’s disposition, including removing it from the market at any time for any reason whatsoever.  Intellectual property is property, and its creators and owners deserve full protection.

That said, I’m happy to see TriTryst and other abandoned games available on the abandonware sites.  The more respectable of the sites (The Underdog is one such) have a policy of not posting games that are currently active, and removing any game if the publisher so requests.  Copyright holders, for the most part, allow this to continue because the old games increase the publishers’ exposure without affecting of their new games.  As long as the abandonware sites honor publishers’ requests to discontinue distribution of particular games, then everybody wins, except those who would dictate to an owner how his property is to be used.

I bought the game Monopoly Tycoon on a whim last month at Fry’s.  It’s a real-time resource management game that doesn’t share a whole lot in common with the board game.  But it’s a reasonably good game.  It looks nice, it’s simple enough to learn the basics in an hour or so, and has enough depth to be entertaining for quite some time depending on how much you want to fiddle with optimizing your businesses.  I don’t usually like real-time games because the time element makes me feel rushed when playing against the computer.  Against human opponents games get downright frantic.  In Monopoly Tycoon, though, things happen at a slow enough pace that I actually have enough time to enjoy the game.

Another thing I like about the game is that its scenarios are well balanced and presented in order of increasing difficulty.  After the first half dozen or so (which you can complete in a matter of minutes), each of the scenarios (at least the 15 or so that I’ve played so far) is short enough that it can be completed in about an hour.  Contrast that with Railroad Tycoon and other similar games that require hours to complete.

My only complaint with the game is that it’s a bit sluggish on my computer.  I have a 700 MHz Pentium 3 with 512 MB of RAM.  The thing should run like a scalded cat, but it doesn’t.  Mouse response is terrible at times, and I just don’t understand why.  There just isn’t that much going on in the game.

Sluggish performance aside, I’m delighted with the game.  I can spend an hour or two enjoying a scenario and then put the game aside for next time.  At this rate, I’ll be able to play it for years.  Go to the web site and take a look.  Download the free demo and check it out.  It’s a very good game.