So the duck post is a little screwy, lately. I’ll do a new version over the weekend. It’s overdue.

First, please check this out and watch the video:

Second…

I rewarded myself for having cleared the Big Presentation by buying the latest version of a computer game I used to enjoy growing up. The game is called Civilization, and it’s now on it’s fifth major iteration.

The first version came out in 1991, which was about when my family got our first computer. I remember how long it took to load up, and I remember not being able to pronounce some of the terms used within the game, and especially the names of objects, such as the types of ships you could develop, or other kinds of units and structures you could build.

At the beginning of a game you could choose your civilization from a list, and I would always choose America.

You start in 4000BC and the steps are basically to found a city, grow the city, create settlers, found another city in a good place, grow it and expand it, create some caveman military units to stand guard, and then create more settlers and found more cities. You grow each of your cities by deciding what things they should develop. If the city is on a river, then build an irrigation system. If it’s on the coast, build a light house. The options available to you for building grow as you develop new technologies by investing in scientific discovery. You begin way down with inventing pottery and then then the wheel and from then on you make decisions based on what you think is most important. The technology “map” becomes a giant tree with many branches, and some of them only open to you once you make it far enough around others. Of course, ultimately you want to develop them all, but you don’t have the resources to investigate every branch at once, so you have to prioritize based on your needs, and also use your relationships with other civilizations to trade technologies.

So those basic aspects of the game have stayed the same over 20 years of refinement. In our current cycle of technology development, 20 years of refinement of a piece of software is pretty remarkable. The amount of things Sid Meier and his group of designers and developers did well on the very first shot is pretty astounding.

One of the most talked about aspects of the game over the years is its addictive “just one more turn” game play. After spending about 3 hours in Civilization V last night, I can tell you that aspect has not changed at all.

There are a couple significant additions. Firstly, the graphics of course are now fantastic. You can zoom all the way in to the village level and actually see your people at work, doing the things you’ve asked them to do. Some of them will be building farms, some will be building stables or trading posts or chopping trees. So that’s neat to watch happen. Sometimes it’s nice to pull back and just observe everything that’s under way in your civilization.

Also, the soundtrack and other sound effects are excellent. It’s light classical music with some tonal changes when things happen– if there’s extra tension between you and a neighboring civilization, you can hear it, which makes you feel it. It’s a great feature because it’s always on and just blends into and out of different “moods” without actually changing the “song”.

I’m also really impressed by some of the diplomacy features. If you mow over another civilization, you might be respected by others. But if you first make friends with a civilization and then mow it over, what happens is that other leaders who are aware of what happened will “denounce” you, and that gives you a reputation that can really hurt your success. Other civilizations will be less likely to trade with you if you’ve been denounced, and they might even be more likely to stab you in the back later, when they make a run at mowing over their part of the world.

Anyway, so far it’s excellent. It’s the kind of game that’s best played as an experience. For me, that’s a big pot of coffee on a weekend night with nothing to do the next morning, and that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow night.

Have a great weekend, and look for my updated site next week.