GalCiv2 not only captured my imagination but inspired Tom Francis to write one of the most incisive, engaging, and hilarious pieces of games writing I read in 2007.
I came back to play Galactic Civilizations II. I had to leave my Starcraft and HoMM III discs in the care of a close friend so that I’d actually graduate.Īfter graduation, when I came back, it was for strategy games: Dawn of War and Crusader Kings and AI War and Civilization IV (and Civ IV ’s countless mods). When I was young, my friends and I were a dorky carbuncle fastened to a desktop computer, hotseating our way through the demo for Heroes of Might & Magic, hollering as Gandhi nuked us in Civilization, fiddling with our dial-up modems to silence the squelch so we could play covert games of Command & Conquer after we were supposed be in bed, and skipping classes in university to play Just One More Match of Starcraft. He studies interactive fiction and roguelikes and is hard at work on DernRL, a traditional roguelike based on the career of Laura Dern. He somehow managed to write this piece while grappling with a debilitating Stellaris addiction. Rob is about to graduate from the University of Waterloo with a Masters in Experimental Digital Media.