Two bits of game news: one good, one bad

(Note: If you’re not into gaming, you’ll perhaps find this post exceedingly boring; it’s not at all like most of my other Sys13 entries. You’ve been warned. If you aren’t a gamer geek, you might want to turn back - now! )

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been treated to some great gaming news, and some not so great gaming news.

The good news is that the next expansion pack to Civilization IV, Beyond the Sword, is coming along very nicely. It’s supposed to be released in July. The PC section of IGN has a nice write up about the additions here. There are a lot of new things in Beyond the Sword that I’m really looking forward to playing with. The Apostolic Palace looks quite interesting, letting you win a diplomatic victory way before you can build the United Nations. It also opens up a variety of other diplomacy “things” you can toy with. The corporations and colony stuff also sounds interesting. The colony feature, though, while it’s a bit more realistic, sounds like a huge trade off: basically say goodbye to your cities on other continents, while keeping access to the resources, so you can stop paying out the arse to maintain overseas cities. While having more income’s nice, I don’t know how I’m going to feel about basically “letting go” of my overseas holdings and letting an AI leader take over them.

I have to chuckle about one feature they’ve added, the espionage slider. This espionage slider thing is blatantly ripped off from Galactic Civilizations 2 and its expansion pack, Dark Avatar. The exact same espionage system is in GalCiv2. You can even sabotage buildings in GalCiv2, just like they’ve added in Beyond the Sword. Having said that, though, I’m glad they’ve put it in; while GalCiv2 is an alright game, Civilization IV is (in my opinion) leaps and bounds above its bound-in-space brethren. The espionage will be a great new layer of gameplay.

The bit of bad news is that Spore has been delayed again - sort of, anyway. While the information being passed around is a bit confusing, the fact of the matter is this: we aren’t going to see Spore anytime soon. It being a game that involves evolution, civilization building, space exploration, terraforming, war, and a ton of other open-ended goodies, this is a game that I really want to play. I don’t want to wait until 2008 or 2009 to play it. We wants it now, precious! If you’ve not watched a demonstration video of Spore in action, watch this one. It’s a good one.