The Nerd's Soup

I feel like I should be proud of myself, but I’m not, really.  I achieved a cultural victory in Civilization IV, the same method by which Egypt kicked my Celtic butt in my last game.  To win a cultural victory, three of a player’s cities have to reach “Legendary”-grade culture.  This isn’t easy; you can’t plop down the Taj Mahal and expect to reach Legendary before time runs out.  It’s a series of calculated decisions.  First you have to pick right leader for the job (Louis XIV of France builds wonders faster than other leaders and gets a culture bonus right off the bat).  You should pick the cities you want to go for Legendary early on (your first three will probably work nicely).  You should build wonders that not only give you lots of culture points but give you a better chance of birthing the right Great People (Great Artists are very helpful here), and it helps to find rare resources, like marble and stone, to cut the building time in half.  You should watch out for buildings that multiply your culture points.  You should choose Civics, or forms of government, that help you out (I didn’t separate church and state for a long time, but I had free speech).  Even the Corporation I founded in the late game was a boon to my culture, but by then I already had it in the bag.

So I do all this.  I suppose I expected a magnificent, beautiful video when Lyons joined Paris and Orleans as Legendary cities, but here’s what I get:

That’s it?  Yeah, I know I built cool buildings, but hey, I raised the French out of nothing and, out of all civilizations, I made them the most civilized.  I want to see my citizens drinking fine wine while they listen to Coldplay, or handing the secrets of rock n’ roll to primitive tribes living out in the jungle.  Le sigh.

My opponents were a little disappointing, too.  I kept the same difficulty level, but I made the terrain a series of islands, instead of larger continents.  This seemed to confuse them.  They were trying to trade for my surplus iron when iron deposits were within their borders.  No.  If you’re too stupid to develop your own resources, you’re not ready to make swords yet.

Then there was this episode , a silly publicity stunt put on by, who else, our friends at Electronic Arts.  I was thinking really hard about whether my righteous rath wrath should make an appearance (it looked so tongue-in-cheek, and it was ), but it looks like other people have me covered .  Events don’t exactly plan themselves around your Tuesday/Friday post schedule.

My only real source of distress about this game and its marketing is the fact that Dante’s name is still on this project.  As I remember one Kotaku commenter saying, this game “misses the point so hard, it physically hurts.”  Not that I’m under any illusions that they’re trying, I just think Dante would cry if he saw what these people were doing with his story.  I just keep getting these images of a crumbling skeleton, buried under the grass and the dirt and the rocks, so far down that no one can hear him sob.