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30 Greatest Games of 2005
Next Generation continues its end-of-year celebration with a treatise on the 30 finest games of the year. From the article: "Some may remember 2005 as a year of financial shortfalls, rising game production costs, depleted Xbox 360 stock, political soap-boxing, or over-exertion in Korean Internet cafes. Forget all that stuff for now. 2005 wasn't a year to be remembered for one great gaming breakthrough or innovation, but it did produce some remarkable products. It was a year marked with some of the best games of the fading generation. "
2005 was not an especially good year for PC games, with most of the attention on sequels that you can play in your sleep they are so similar to what is already out there. Consoles and portables got some innovative titles, while PC gamers get left with sequels that play the same, but have a hard time running on modern hardware (I'm looking at you, Civ 4).
Rome: Total War, Diablo 2, UT2k4, and Ranarama (old game) took most of my attention this year, plus multiplayer Call of Duty. Nothing came out this year to take my attention away from games I was already playing.
So, here I am, a user of Civilization IV (the highly acclaimed game from Firaxis), and I can tell you that you do NOT want to buy this game right now. The game was clearly released before the holiday season to take advantage of gullible users (hmph, me.. =\) who needed to spend their hard earned cash on a game that was only half developed.
Civfanatics.com is an extremely good resource for people crazy about Civilization IV, and you can immediately see there are some serious problems with the game. There have already been two patches (25 megs and 45 megs a pop) in the first couple months of the release, and things are still terrible with the game. Basically, the memory usages generally runs in the territory of unbelievable (600-800 megs), with the game basically unplayable after a certain point. You don't actually experience some of the most interesting parts of the game because things are just that amazingly slow.
But don't take my word for it, read the posts on civfanatics.com.
This is just another reason why corporations bastardize the faith that users have in them. Firaxis, shame on you.
I agree, the RAM usage is insane, and if you play with a Huge map, you can forget about ever reaching the end of the game without a few gigs of RAM to play with....
However, it wouldn't be so upsetting if this game wasn't so well done in every other aspect.
Simply amazing. If they had put the extra months into it, this wouldn't be a 9.0, the game would be as close to 10 as I think we're capable of reaching as imperfect beings...
Flaws aside, I still play it.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
128MB should be enough? Who says? I upgraded from 128 to 256 two years ago, for less than $100, and my Asus GeForce FX 5700 runs Civ4 just fine. The thing about progress is that it depends upon things progressing. Among other things this means that at some point your video card is going to need to be replaced with something newer. Civ4 is just the first of many games that you won't be able to play. You just gotta accept that your video card is Old News. An FX5700 is like fifty bucks on ebay. Suck it up and upgrade like a man.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
But something happened for the first time this year: A Linux game impressed me. Because I downloaded the http://wolvix.org/ Wolvix Gaming Edition CD, and then later installed the http://www.pygame.org/news.html pygame library on Mandriva so I could run some of the games I'd been introduced to. While Linux gaming *still* isn't where it should be, these two elements this year show a strong sprint to bring up the rear, at least. I am especially impressed with how smooth the pygame apps run, and how incredibly easy it is to program in given the alternative of running up your own in C++. Be interresting to see where it is in five years.