Caesar IV
We went on a small shopping spree last night, stopping in Best Buy and Barnes & Noble. Atypically, I bought not one but three things for myself: an issue of Games magazine, a book of mathematical curiosities in the vein of Martin Gardner, and the Caesar IV CD. This last was the real prize. Growing increasingly frustrated with the way World of Warcraft only needs a handful of players to figure out how to succeed in encounters, and how I’m never able to advance quickly enough to be among that handful, I’m looking for a new pastime. I’m a big fan of the Caesar-Zeus-Emperor series, and Caesar IV looks to fill the bill nicely.
Or rather, looked. Upon loading it into my machine, I found it wouldn’t run. A consultation with Eileene quickly determined that the problem was my graphics card, which can’t handle the wifty new 3-D graphics.
That was a real bummer. Granted, my graphics card is aging, but the underlying engine for the game as a game is quite simple, and, apart from graphics, places few demands on the system. Playing some of the older titles, which use virtually identical programs, on my system, which is just as old as my graphics card, demands artificially slowing the game down just to allow me to see things happen. This wouldn’t mean much in a video game, but when a sedate city-building strategy title goes too fast to watch, you know it’s got a fairly simple code.
So it’s disappointing to see Caesar IV demand so much in the way of graphic power. Super-juicy graphics can be critical for some games, especially the ones that seek to place you in the game, as a first-person shooter does, or Black and White. Graphics are much, much less important for management sims. For these glorified spreadsheets, a clean, pleasant design is all you need. Simple esthetics worked just fine for Sid Meier’s SimGolf, for example. Players don’t need—and largely don’t want—to see every pore on every villager’s face in a city of ten million inhabitants. Gorgeous graphics are welcome everywhere, of course, but if the price of gorgeous graphics in a game that doesn’t demand them is not being able to play, then gorgeous graphics are out of place.
I will get to play eventually. We’ll swap computers around here until I’ve got all the components I need, but… that just shouldn’t be necessary, because it’s done to indulge a feature that's unnecessary, except to the marketing deparment of Sierra.