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Galactic Civilizations Demo Released
Galactic Civilizations is a recently released PC space-based strategy game (see our earlier story on it, or check out an elegant review at Gamespot), notable for favorable comparisons against the none too favorably received Master Of Orion 3. There's now a Windows demo (51mb) of Galactic Civilizations available, originally released via Gamespot, but also downloadable from Gamershell, Fileshack, and from Gametab's BitTorrents page. Not bad for a game originally developed for OS/2 back in 1994.
This game is really very fun, except it has a couple deep flaws that prevent it from being a classic.
I played constantly for about 3 weeks, until it got reptitive and tiring.
Yes, sometimes.
In some cases, Linux beats Windows on 3D speed, though I can't cite the reference. It isn't across the board, by any means. But in some cases.
There's much touted that the nVidia drivers are single-source cross-compiled for the different platforms. Supposedly with minimal glue, the same source generates both Windows and Linux drivers.
There is also rumbling that the new ATI "Catalyst" drivers use the same philosophy, except that there are also Open Source drivers for the Radeon.
Now all I need is a separate GART driver for my nForce2 board so I can get hardware 3D out of my Radeon under Linux. For the moment, the nForce2 has *tied* its AGP support under Linux to nVidia graphics cards.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I played the original on OS2 so I'm biased, but this is one of the best 4X games I've ever played. You can win militarily, you can go tech, you can win an interesting cultural victory. It also doesn't have the "critical mass" problem many 4x games do where you know you'll win, or have no chance, once you reach a certain critical mass. The other AI's either help you or join against you, heavily based on their evil/good sympathies. I've come back from a bad position when other "saintly" AI players came to may aid during a war. I've also lost from a position where I was waaay ahead technologically, but fairly suddenly 3 AI's banded together and whacked me with some coordination. A big surprise after the largely uncoordinated moves from other 4X games. In MOO being at war with 3 different races meant fighting 3 individual foes. In GalCiv it's more like fighting an alliance of foes. They trade techs, and ships, for their mutual good. Anyway, it's not a graphics-lovefest, though it's not bad graphically, but it does have great gameplay.