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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.
How about Quake 3? Unreal Tournament? Unreal tournament 2003? Neverwinter Nights? Devastation? America's Army (soon)? And that's not even covering mods...More and more games are coming out for Linux, it's not an overnight thing, but it is happening. Give it time, there are benefits to Linux gaming (I get 20 more fps under Linux playing Quake3 than under Windows). Just wait, it will happen.
The demo exit sequence is a bit annoying. Normally, you can skip through the parts where they tell you about how good their game is. I couldn't, in this demo. While this has nothing to do with how good the actual game is, annoying stunts like this don't help the user's impression. I didn't check whether the intro could be skipped though. Hmph.
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.