Basket.

I actually fairly often during the day think about what I want to write here, but usually forget it when I get to this screen. Isn't that ridiculous. Story of my life.

It has been a day of lazing/studying alternately at home. I don't think there is a lot the Econs department can do to help my understanding of the subject, prickly as this object of concern is. We'll find out soon enough how much I actually understand, at any rate.

I bought Civilization 3 and its expansion last week (kind of birthday present from myself to myself?), and I must say it was a bloody waste of twelve dollars. I can't call them heretics because Sid Meier is still around and responsible for this travesty; I can only conjecture that in the eight years since he made Civ 2 he has been possessed by a horse demon with little aptitude in computer game crafting. That can be the only explanation for this hell of a mess anyone at all actually dares to call a "computer game".

My main beef is they have made it far too complicated, what with special resources, only able to build irrigation next to fresh water, an overhauling of the combat system blahblahblah. The result is that the game is so much less fluid than its predecessor. I can't find what I want, and that irritates the hell out of me; the interface is a bloody nightmare. Civ 2 was so, so, so much better - all you needed to know displayed on the screen for you to very clearly see. And what the hell? Now workers and settlers are completely separate and unequal! How troublesome is that? It's like they went out of their way to piss off the casual player. Civ 2 was so easy to pick up. You begin a new game, B to build city, train a warrior, switch to produce settlers, move them out, found another city, rinse and repeat. Now you B to build city, navigate the mazy interface to find out more about your city, see it get disease, see it grow slowly because you can't any longer plop down irrigation so quickly, see it not have special resources so you can't launch a lightning game of conquest. It frustrates me.

I mean, why make the learning curve so difficult and everything so complicated? Simple wins the day for me. I'm a casual gamer, and so are most of the people out there. Serious gamers, sure, it would seem a fantastic game to them, to twist their minds and test themselves to the mettle, but me, I just want a game I can sit down to and relax while playing at the end of a long hard day. Civilization 3 is not that game; I had hoped it would be.

Bah.