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#59 A BUBBA'S EYE RATES SMAC (Part I) Roger Oepkes writes about the successes of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri #60 MULTIPLAYER CIV... Die hard multi-player advocate Kwang quits #61 A BUBBA'S EYE RATES SMAC (Part II) Roger Oepkes writes about the failures of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri #62 NO EXCUSES Derek Barrett doesn't accept any excuses for a bad civ3 #63 WHAT WE CAN TEACH KIDS WITH CIV James Cobb shows us another side of civ games COLUMN ARCHIVE

I Want it all
I want it all
I want it all
and I want it now.

That's the chorus of a very well known song by Queen. The irony is that it's sung by guys that own millions, gave gigs all over the world, to audiences above 300,000 fans.

Of course they were kidding.

Why do I refer to this song in a civ-community ? Or better, why do I refer to this song in a game community ? I'm in games for about 10 years now, and I notice lately that a lot has changed since the start of the real big gaming industry.

In one line: The better the games are, the more disappointed the gamers become. Nobody ever complained really about civ. Civ2 was the greatest game ever. The 2 add-ons for civ2 were brilliant (even if some of them only got scenarios....scenarios that everybody could have made themselves) but then......

Then suddenly something touched the game community. All released are doomed in advance to get very much critics. Of course we all know more about the technology, and of course we all have our ideas more then ever before.... and this results in that we are all very very very disappointed with in fact everything that is released since Civ2:MPG edition.

Is this only the case with civ releases ? Nope. C&C:TS is a famous example as well. People have been waiting for the game for 2 years, and therefor they are so excited about it that finally the real game disappoints them. Why ? because it's a game made by humans, but they expected a game made by gods or something.

In the year 2000 civilization 3 will be released. I think that it will be one big disappointment again. We are already expecting a game that is even better than really ruling a nation. We expect graphics that look better than the real world around us. We expect an AI with the intelligence of Deep Blue (the first and only computer that won a human in a game of chess) and all combined with great music (better then Queen ever performed), fast internet connections (faster then local games) and of course for only $10.

I hope we don't fool ourselves by expecting more then we can get. We'll become disappointed again. Maybe we should enjoy what we get, and have fun again like we got in the past. But...again... maybe we've grown up in the wrong society. The ego-centric society.

I want it all
I want it all
I want it all
and I want it now.

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About the author: 21 year old male from The Netherlands. Civer since civ1

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