Civ:BE kind of annoyed me in many ways. It had all the potential to be a great game, but it just missed the mark. Its only redeeming feature was Aspyr's great porting skills.

I could point out lots of small criticisms, but I think the main one for me is that it has no personality as a game. They made Civ 5 in space (I can't really call it Alpha Centauri) but they didn't really "sell" the game to the player in my opinion, it just feels like the micromanaging and statistical side of strategy games but with all the fun taken out. Basically, they took out the "role playing" (for lack of a better term, maybe storytelling is a better term) aspect of Civ and left us a pretty dull strategy game.

The main thing for me that makes Civilization games addictive and fun is that there is a sense of progress and the sense that you're really building up a civilization and expanding it (at least for me). Researching technologies and building wonders in Civ 5 gives a sense of progress and that you're creating an advanced civilization, with greater wealth, culture, etc. Civ:BE lacks that and those statistical increases just feel like numbers on a screen. Even choosing "energy" instead of money kind of does this, it just makes it seem like they re-skinned Civ 5 to make it look more futuristic and changed things like gold and culture which mean things to us to random words which are utterly meaningless - even "space dollars" would have been better than that.

Sure, in part that's the fault of the genre - with science fiction you need good storytelling to make it believable and interesting, but at the same time that's not all that hard to pull off, even in a strategy game. It's much more easy to envision the advancement of society through the invention of the wheel rather than micro nanobots or whatever, but that's where they needed to "sell" it to the player. I remember Civ 4 having nice animations when you built wonders - that's the kind of thing that was needed here to put across a sense of progress rather than a small vague drawing which you click on and 15 turns later you get a message saying "small vague drawing has been completed, which small vague drawing would you like to wait for next?". Maybe I'm being a bit flippant, but the point is valid, the whole thing just felt arbitrary and incoherent. After researching terraforming, you would expect to be able to seriously change the environment around you rather than just be able to build little gardens - again, just Civ 5 re-skinned.

Normally if I don't like a game, it's fine, I just shelve it. But this really annoyed me because it could have been far, far more than just a total conversion mod with higher production values. At first when I saw the negative reviews I thought it was like when Civ 5 came out and people moaned about there being less content than Civ 4, but after playing this I don't think it can even be fixed with some expansions. There just is no reason to play this over Civ 5.

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View video on youtube.com

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I'll play this for sure when it gets close to 1.0. Never played Morrowind, Oblivion was my first TES game.

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Quoting: subDoes CorsixTH also allows to play the original missions and original gameplay?

Yes, it's the original campaign. Nothing significant has changed other than being able to play at 1080p and then a few minor things (last time I played) like menus and a few in-game tweaks I can't remember.

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I played CorsixTH lot a couple of years ago, it was really great to be able to play the greatest game known to man on a large monitor and on Linux!

Might pick it up again sometime, but really can't wait until they start adding new diseases, treatments, new levels, decorations and generally improving the original game further. Though Theme Hospital is a work of genius, I really want a new challenge since over the years I've pretty much exhausted it in its current state, so adding those things would give me more incentive to play the game for the 50,000th time.

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Awesome! Also the last "serendipity" point is very true. There's so many games in my library (the vast majority actually) which I just wouldn't have bought if I wasn't a Linux user and so many of them have turned out to be amazingly good :).

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Don't think uteri look like the inside of the space worm from the Empire Strikes Back.

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I'm really glad this is happening, it's really cool! Next year, I'd like to see awards for developers and porting houses too :). Also coke and limousines, but can't have everything.

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Quoting: liamdaweThe new sales block has been enabled.

Quoting: psychoamericana

Quoting: Segata SanshiroLooks absolutely great! I really like the way the articles are presented now, like the headline on top with the speech bubble and stuff :) Hadn't seen that part yet.

Any way we could have "GamingOnLinux" back at the top though? Penguin looks a bit lonely there, has done for a while now.

I feel there should be text as well which isn't showing up. When the page loads on my tablet or phone I see the text "Gaming On Linux" in blue for a second until the logo loads then it disappears. I imagine the text is there as alternate text but disappears once the logo populates in the browser's cache. I am not sure if that is by design or not. Firefox on all 3 devices used. Android 4.4 on my phone, Android 4.2.2 on my tablet, and Firefox DE (Aurora) on my desktop.

That is the html alt text if the image cannot be loaded, we may add text to the nav, but it's low priority and only a possibility.

Tried this in several different browsers and there's always no text there (this actually happened before the re-design too, but I thought it was just a temporary thing). Would be nice to have something there, I doubt we're the only ones this happens to.

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Looks absolutely great! I really like the way the articles are presented now, like the headline on top with the speech bubble and stuff :) Hadn't seen that part yet.

Any way we could have "GamingOnLinux" back at the top though? Penguin looks a bit lonely there, has done for a while now.

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