So I was sitting there at work last week, minding my own business, when I looked up and saw Kevin walking up the ramp towards me. Before I had a chance to even think "What's he doing here?," I was on my feet to meet him at the door.
We exchanged greetings, and he handed me an unopened Civilization III box, and said "I bought it at Expo but haven't had a chance to play it..." (This was in response to this comment thread).
So I thanked him and I returned to preparing for a meeting.
Eventually I got home and made a few minutes to give the game a whirl, and here are my first impressions of the game. It should be noted that I've never played any Civ game before, so I'm coming to this with a fresh eye.
- My laptop is a little slow for this game, so there's a little too much access/load time and the graphics are a little jerky for my tastes. It's tolerable, but it'd all add up to drive me nuts. This is the first application I've found other than OS X itself that's made me wish I had a faster computer.
- I can't switch out of the game while leaving it running in the background, so I have to save and quit every time I want to so much as check my email. This drives me nuts. This also makes me wish I'd bought that mac bundle so I could just play the game on a nice fast dedicated computer to game on while still doing work on my laptop. Honestly, what's the point of having an amazing multi-tasking OS if I'm stuck doing one thing at a time?
- There seems to be a little too micro-management for my tastes. However, it is turn based, so this problem doesn't damn it. (In contrast, I can't stand any of {WarCraft, StarCraft, Homeworld, etc} because of the real time strategy and resource management aspect. I want to work on strategy, or manage resources, but not both at the same time.)
And uh, that's about all the more I had a chance to figure out, because there were emails that I had to attend to, and the continuous saving and restarting of Civ III was just burning way too much time and making me cranky that I had to stop.
I think I'll stick with EV Nova for now, because I'm free to switch applications at a moments notice with that game, and if I get a PowerBook G4 like I hope to this fall, I'll give Civ III another look.