Kharma-Civilian.
By Ahchay

You’ll be aware, of course, that most of the games we review here at WotR are bought by the reviewers themselves, from their own pocket and normally after release. As a result of this we normally concentrate more on the slightly left-field releases that you might otherwise miss.

Like Civilization 4.

Erm. No, sorry, that’s not right.

No, we were lucky enough to cadge a review copy of Civilization 4, giving me the luxury of three whole weeks to play the newest iteration of one of the great videogames before you lot got your grubby little mitts on it. I was very happy.

So, it was with no little amount of glee that I started the long, laborious job of transferring two DVDs worth of Civ goodness over to my laptop. Three whole weeks of conquest, city building and citizen oppression lay ahead of me. I couldn’t wait.

“Unable to initialise Direct3D”

Bollocks, what’s all that about? This is Civ for gods sake, not Quake 4, what on earth do I need 3D for? Yup, that’s the first shock; this is the first time that Civ has required anything even approaching an up-to-date PC.

Surely Civ used to play on something like this?

Still, it’s not the end of the world. I’ll just install it on my girlfriend’s hulking great luggable thing and be done with it. At least that machine has got some form of DirectX installed and working. Sure, I won’t be able to play Civ sitting on the train any more, but at least I’ll be able to play the game…

Well, obviously, it was never going to be that simple. That machine choked and died with a typically unhelpful error message.

My work PC fared a little better. Managing to not only start the game, but also to actually get as far as world creation before filling the screen with a tantalisingly close glimpse of what the game looked like on the accompanying media DVD. I managed 1000 years of game time before the display degenerated to such an extent that I couldn’t actually see what was happening in the city screen and turned the game off in disgust.

By this time, the Civ urges (if you’ve ever played this game through the night, you’ll know the feeling) were becoming almost uncontrollable. I had, by now, lost about a week of my lead time before the game was on shop shelves. Still, never mind, two weeks of Civ time is more than enough to play a few complete games and form an opinion (the lure of a ‘quick game’ setting on the menu was enough to spur me on) so I made a decision.

My laptop, whilst lovely and portable and shiny and what-not, was just too much of a luxury item to keep. I’d sell it on Ebay for £600 and use the money to purchase a cheap, but capable, PC and use the balance for the Xbox 360 next month. I shall get to play Civ 4 after all!

How it should look, those horses look a bit big mind!

The laptop is languishing on Ebay as we speak and I took my credit card into Dixons and bought an ex-display PC for £260. Hardly earth shattering performance, but I’ve got a few graphics cards lying around from the last time I owned a PC and one of them was bound to work. It’ll be good enough.

So, I drag this PC home, whack the back off it and install a Geforce 5200 graphics card that doesn’t look too badly damaged. Luckily the drivers were preinstalled with XP and the PC fired up first time. Time to hunt out that DVD again.

I’ve only gone and lost it down the back of the sofa. Never mind, I’ll just copy it off the laptop again, it’ll be fine. I do this, sit back with a nice bottle of whisky and prepare to become humanity’s worst nightmare.

Click. Click-click. Bollocks. Now it’s only moaning about my drivers being out of date. 32mb and over four hours later downloading drivers on a sodding dial-up connection I’m completely up to date and ready to try again. Hoorah!

“This demo expires on 30 Oct 2005, please contact your licensee to extend.”

Nothing more to add your honour.

Fucks sake. That’ll teach us. It might be really good. We’ll let you know next month. If we’ve bought it or we’re not too busy playing it. And if we don’t forget.

No Stars

November 2005

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