It begins...

Manang Tindera: Sir, installer, PC Games...
Me: (uninterested) Anong bago niyong games?
Manang Tindera: Call of Duty...Age of Empires...Civilization
Me: ... Meron na?!

So there, after weeks of waiting, checking out the Datablitz website, reading online message boards, and stopping by Greenhills, I've finally gotten hold of Civilization 4 -- the software equivalent of crack.

There are a few games which I had bought original: The Sims, The Sims 2, Sim City 4 and Civilization 3, among others. The rest, I admit, I get pirated copies of, if only to bypass the annoying and pathetic copy-protection techniques such as running the game without CDs (the infamous No-CD cracks). Other reasons have to do with my game purchasing philosophy.Take for example the NBA Live series. Every year, there is an NBA Live game out sometime before the beginning of the NBA regular season (around September or October). Now how stupid does buying the same kind of game for thousands of pesos every year. Yeah, sure, it's "different", even "better" every year but then the thing is, who plays NBA Live 2003 these days. Yep, nobody! So throw away the CD after a year? Let it gather dust? Give to the poor? They should come up with a subscription-type scheme that favors licensed owners of the previous year's version. If there is such a thing, I haven't heard it here.

This doesn't really explain why I buy those aforementioned games in original format when I can always buy them pirated (no matter how many raids the police conduct). The reason is simple: they are quality games and I like the developers to make more of them. I mentioned before that these games (or franchises/series) were timeless. I could pop in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (which I had my dad take home from the U.S. around 5 years ago), install it, and still enjoy playing it until morning. How's that for value-for-money?

--

Anyway, here's the uninteresting part of the post: me raving or ranting about the game.

Check out this Saturday-Sunday timeline:

11:15 PM - Arrive home. Try to install Civ 4. The game did not install properly.
11:30 PM - 1:00 AM - Search Internet for troubleshooting tips
1:30 AM - Game finally runs (Use Run in Windows 2000 compatibility mode)
1:30 AM - 5:00 AM - Play game. Game crashes occasionally. Put up with it.
5:00 AM - Thirty minutes na lang...
5:30 AM - Sun rises (though there's no crowing rooster anymore in our
neighborhood)
5:35 AM - Try to sleep. Zzz...
9:30 AM - Sun is shining on my face. Wake up, have breakfast.
9:45 AM - Play more Civ 4 until it's time to get ready for church.
11:30 AM - 3:00 PM - Church, Lunch, walk around Greenbelt. Buy Visine. Go home.
3:00 PM - Play more Civ 4.

If that game didn't crash on my computer as frequent as it did, I'd have played a lot more than that.

(I'm not an addict!)

The franchise itself has acknowledged this type of addiction with Civilization Anonymous, a fictional support group for Civ Addicts.

But the crashes are really annoying since it runs quite a bit slow on my system (AMD XP2200, 512 MB RAM, 128MB Video, unbelievable), and so now I'm thinking of getting another 512MB of RAM. I realize that this could also be just a result of bad programming, with which a game patch to come can solve the performance issues. Until then I am seriously thinking of that RAM upgrade.

(I'm not an addict!)

That's about three-thousand bucks, hmmm...

(I'm not an addict!)