From Peter Berger’s recent post about Galactic Civilizations II.

Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations II is a great game. I can’t stand it.

It appeals to a lot of players, has simple game mechanics, an acceptable UI, and a very high degree of polish. There are many people whose opinions I respect who enjoy it immensely, and you might be one of them.

I am not one of the people that enjoy Galactic Civilizations. It bores me. It bores me to tears.

I suspect I’m not the only person who has a list of games they think they should like, but don’t. If I simply didn’t like GalCiv I would have played it once and ignored it. But instead, every so often I forget that I don’t like it. It’s simple to learn, hard to master! It’s polished! It’s shiny! I’ll play it again, and maybe this time I’ll like it!

Peter’s objections to GalCiv 2 largely boil down to pacing, in my opinion. Buildings can be queued and upgrade automatically, so there isn’t much domestic micromanagement after the first few turns. Relying on this, however, would only exacerbate his problems with the “end turn” button being the only thing to do. It’s a thoughtful look at a game that I, personally, think is easily the best space 4x game available, improved by the recent expansion.

The opening, however, got me thinking about games that I am supposed to like but don’t. Not the usual pointless claptrap about games being “overrated” or about the mass of humanity not being tuned into my deeper wavelength. Just games that I recognize as being quality product, games that I can rationally accept as milestones or important titles, but that still don’t entertain me or amuse me. Kind of like how I can watch Animal House, understand why people find it funny but still find myself flipping the channel to watch a Girlfriends marathon.

Age of Empires II fills this spot for me. From a pure game design perspective, it is an objectively better game than the original AoE game. It had formations, town centers that vigorously defended themsevles, unique units to separate the factions, better peon management…all of these are so standard now that it’s easy to forget how these changes wowed the critics.

But, to quote Peter, “It bores me to tears.”

Part of the problem was that the cool stuff became uncool after a while. It took a while before the race balancing made the Teutonic Knight unit anything but a juggernaut (he was hard to kill and harder to convert) and the introduction of the trebuchet to a generation of gamers somehow meant that this Weapon of Medieval Destruction would be the god unit. If your opponent could get three trebuchets out before you could get even one, you were screwed. They would target your castle and that would be it. Using a square formation around a few siege units could make you invincible, especially against an AI that really had no idea what it was doing half the time.

The larger problem was that the game seemed dry to me. It had a brain, but not a lot of heart, and refreshed all of the original Age of Empires goodness but with not enough of the cartoon coolness.

Don’t fill the comment box with explanations of what I am missing. I played a lot of Age of Kings. I know what I am supposed to be missing. I accept that it is, in all likelihood, one of the most important RTS titles of all time. And it’s a real treat compared to Warcraft II, which I played almost to the end of the campaign and enjoyed none of. But I don’t get why AoK was the most popular RTS of all time (except for in Korea).

Please do fill the comment box with confessions that some great games aren’t for all people.