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169# CIV3 SHOULD ALLOW "SCENARIO PARALLELS" Civ2 scenarios converted to civ3. Wouldnt it be great? 168# WHY CIV-SPECIFIC UNITS ARE A GOOD IDEA Snapcase defends unique units 167# CTP2 - FOUR OPINIONS Solver guides you to the world of the CTP series 166# MEMO TO ISABELLA, QUEEN OF SPAIN Raingoon of the Chinese sends a memo to Isabella, his ally. Or is it Firaxis? 165# CIV3: WORST FEARS COME TRUE! Fiera is rather unhappy with recent civ3 news COLUMN ARCHIVE

It is a moment of pride and of desillusion. Like the time when you figure out the enemy wont move to avoid your shots if he doesnt see you, like in Half-Life. Or that Marco Polo's embassy will give you a gigantic advantage in Civ2 - in short - you learn to beat the game. So then you crouch around the corner and shoot your enemy in the leg 10 times in a row while he just stands there and whines for a medic. Of course, then comes the solution - patches, mods and add-on software from the Big Company. My concern is, that in the last years software companies seemingly have become sloppy, to say the least, about beta testing their games, and it raises conspiratory thoughts in my mind about developers milking the gamer cow for more money.

For example... (the curtain goes up)... Age of Empires 2. Sure, it was a good game, but some parts of the gameplay were so bad, that the designers must have been under the influence of some unknown mushroom brew not to see the complaints coming ten miles down the road. That +5 range on Teuton town centers screwed up any game they participated in so badly that they were banned from most multiplayer games. And the extreme sense of boiling irritation that oozes from inside you when your army gets shot down by its own catapults just because they dont have the intelligence to check their zone of fire is just indescribable - that is a problem that should have been solved years ago - it was an issue with both Warcraft and AoE1.

But then Microsoft wouldnt have made any money selling The Conquerors Expansion, which corrected many of the rather stupid bugs - and this to the very reasonable price of only $ 19:99. Sure, some of the bug fixes could be downloaded from the Net - a fact that wasnt exactly highly promoted by Microsoft - BUT:

1; Everybody doesnt have access to the Internet.

2; Im not a programmer, but some of those fixes couldnt have taken more than 10 minutes to have been made, and they were out late, late.

3; Would you accept having bought a brand new car, and then finding out that the brakes didnt work, but all is under control, cause in a year youll be able to buy working brakes from Ford.

What made me write this is that I bought CTP2, or, as it should have been called, CTP1.00001. I mean, few new units and features, some unbelievable misses (am I doing something wrong, or does the game actually never show when your units are being bombarded?), and for that I paid the better part of a months earnings (poor young Swede, you know). I read someone expressing comfort that patches might rectify (did I spell that right, or did I just say something very dirty?) any problems - but why should we have to wait, or worse, pay an extra amount of money, for the games we should have gotten in the first place? I have great respect for game creators, but it is my distinct opinion - and I have, as my mother often points out in a not-so-kind voice, pretty long experience of games - that programmers have become lazy with getting out bug-free and well balanced games, since they can "fix it later" ("Oh well, I accidentaly wrote +5 instead of +1 here, but gotta go to lunch, fix it "later"). Sometimes games even ship unfinished just to get them out early, and as I believe, make money on "expansions"!

I have no idea how to solve this problem other than appealing to the game creators with the notion that we want good games - but it would be nice if they didnt make us broke and old before we had a chance to play them.

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About the author: Born 1981, great fan of strategy games, made some strat game scenarios you havent heard of and dont want to

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