{"id":1440,"date":"2009-05-08T10:33:07","date_gmt":"2009-05-08T15:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=1440"},"modified":"2009-05-08T10:33:07","modified_gmt":"2009-05-08T15:33:07","slug":"alpha-centauri-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/05\/08\/alpha-centauri-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"Alpha Centauri Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

While working on a feature for Crispy Gamer, I reinstalled Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri<\/em> so I could take some screenshots. (Fraps didn’t work, by the way. And neither did Print-Screen\/Paste). It is really a great game that holds up so much better than other strategy games of its time.<\/p>\n

I did not know, however, that there was an Alpha Centauri mod for Civilization IV. It shouldn’t surprise me, I suppose. It’s called Planetfall<\/a> and it does a decent job of capturing the factions and the civics\/social engineering. It even introduces religions, though they were nowhere to be found in the original game.<\/p>\n

It isn’t perfect, though, and is in no way a substitute for the original game. First, there isn’t the research track thing, where you pick a direction to focus in and hope for the best. Planetfall uses the traditional Civ “X turns to Ecological Magic Power” thing. Second, the planet seems a lot less hostile than it should be. I played last night and didn’t see a mindworm until I had already built five cities and cleared most of my nation of fungus. Third, it takes forever to learn the tech tree and which discoveries will let your formers do such simple things as farm; this is partly a legacy of the cumbersome scifi naming conventions that Planetfall keeps.<\/p>\n

But the biggest thing missing is the chrome – the personality of the game that is so neatly conveyed in the leader dialog, the music and the Wonder movies. Where I would probably watch the Wonder movies in Civilization II only a few times, I tended to always sit through the SMAC ones because they were so integral to communicating what this distant future could look like.<\/p>\n

I think the older I get the more I appreciate how important these “non-gameplay” things to enjoying a game. Though I’ve often tried to understand games through rules and systems – the pitfalls of a scientific mind – it’s become clearer to me that I only really appreciate those games that build an experience far beyond what is conventionally understood as gameplay. Part of this is graphics and art design, of course. But it’s also small things like the Demigod<\/em> announcer yelling SMITER or seeing towns expand in Empire: Total War.<\/em><\/p>\n

And that, I think, would be the hardest thing to recapture in an Alpha Centauri remake\/sequel. It remains a wonderful game today, and is so timeless than any attempt to grab that experiential magic again would be tough. I’m not a big fan of nostalgia – I lived through the 80s and they weren’t funny – but sometimes a game works so well because it is singular and unique and rooted in an understanding of games as more than just a series of interesting decisions.<\/p>\n

Planetfall<\/em> shows you can take the factions and backstory and science fiction and make a decent homage to Alpha Centauri<\/em>. But the original game is still so much better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While working on a feature for Crispy Gamer, I reinstalled Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri so I could take some screenshots. (Fraps didn’t work, by the way. And neither did Print-Screen\/Paste). It is really a great game that holds up so much better than other strategy games of its time. I did not know, however, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-ne","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1441,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1440\/revisions\/1441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}