Another game that needs no introduction, Civilization II is one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played. I know friends whose college classes suffered at the foot of it, long before Everquest and WoW would do the same for the next generation. Civ2 is still a go-to game for me when I want something slower-paced and engrossing. Also, it can run on just about any PC still working nowadays, with some tweaking.
I played Civ2 for hours and hours. My preferred method of play was trying to stay peaceful and build the spaceship, though wars could be fun. I loved researching all the techs, seeing what I could build with them, and racing the computer to get them first. You never knew what you’d find when exploring – you might find yourself on an island with one of your competitors, or miles away from everyone. Because of that (and many other factors) you had to plan your advancement accordingly – maybe you needed better ships sooner, or you wanted to build up troops to take out that interloper on your continent.
As would happen in many other games, I always got so focused on building and exploring that I would get far behind on the ‘winning’ part of things, but I didn’t care. I grinned whenever some stupid warlike Civ would come at me, and break their armies against the advanced troops I had stationed in my cities. Actually taking one of my cities was the only way to rouse me from my diplomatic slumber and have me razing the offender to ashes.
If the graphics of Civ2 bother you, or you simply want to try a newer version of the game, Civ4 is my favorite of the more recent versions. Civ5 has a few more departures from the classic, though I didn’t play it much – I need to rectify that. Civ: Revolutions on the DS was actually fun as well, surprising to me because of the small screen size.
Leave a Reply