Jeremy's Reviews Blog

Friday, March 02, 2007

Galactic Civilizations II Gold (impressions and a rant)

I got Gal Civ II Gold in the mail yesterday (from Circuit City which is selling it for $28 and offers free shipping) and played it a lot last night. It's not a huge jump over the original GCII, but a number of elements do make it more Moo 2 like. Really a lot of fun. They make an already great game better, which is hard to do.

On the downside, and at the risk of sounding like a nut I found out that they already have a patch for it which fixes somebugs, but in order to get the patch, you have to use Stardock Central, which is basically their version of Steam. I had some seriously horrible experiences with that program back in the GalCiv 1 days. Basically it would corrupt my desktop, making it impossible read anything on the screen. And it made itself run at startup (putting it in the auto load stuff without asking).

They said it's fixed now (and indeed, in response to my protest as to this new policy citing my past problems with it) said that early versions were "rough", but at the time back then, they never acknoleged my problem with it. How do I know it's fixed now? Especially since I am using an odd OS (the 64 bit version of XP) that they probably haven't tested it on, as well as weird video card (not weird, but new-ish).

I'm actually afraid to run it. Sounds silly, but it was really a hassle fixing it.

Grrr. I don't mind having to activate the product. I don't mind registering on their website to get patches. I did mind that they weren't selling the expansion in stores, only the "Gold" version which was full priced, but not that much. But this, this really

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