Missed you too buddy ol pal. In fact, I missed everyone lots and lots. " SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">

Aaron, I simply cannot go back... I have been offline for months now. MANY MONTHS. I miss it, but not nearly enough to go back to dialup.

Truth be told, I have been playing many of my old games again. From Civ 4 to Quake 4 and many others.

I have had lots of fun with them and my son even got me an expansion to Civ 4 under the ol' tree waiting for Christmas to be played. .

Until someone posts a gig sized image.

Nope... I refuse to go back. We got a call last week saying that the limit of the DSL line is only 2000 feet from my door. They should be able to expand sometime in 2008 to include my residence..

I'll wait.

Snarkpit got a long without me this long. It will survive indefinitely if need be. In fact, things look spiffy and quiet enough that my currently being here seems... Over-rated.

Highlight it Aaron. " SRC="images/smiles/heee.gif">

Something else I noticed:

Civ 4 is the better game in the Civ saga, as far as graphics go, but they omitted some key elements that made the previous versions great.

For nostalgia reasons I loaded Civ II to play and couldn't get past the flatness of it, and soon uninstalled it again. Even the fact that I knew it was the better game couldn't entice me to continue.

I did notice that playing 4 took little less than a day to complete. Even if I protractedly took my time to win through "Goodness" and had all the other Civ's voting me winner. Most of us know that winning that way is about the hardest.

I played Civ II games upward of two weeks for a single game. Some would call that tedious, but thinking about it myself I'd have to disagree because most of the tedium was simply setting up the infrastructure of the worlds. Thats no more tedious than say as RPG and its "Hack/slash.. Pick up gold... Go to town... Return to hack/slash... Repeat..." " SRC="images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif">

My biggest, and only real complaint was that there was no coastal defenses in Civ 4. The stupid computer players always took advantage of this by placing untold numbers of ships off my shores ant attempting to bash my walls into undefensiveness. Yeah, I was almost always advanced enough to bomb their wooden ships with my bombers, but dammit I missed my coastal defense advance. " SRC="images/smiles/sad.gif">

I did however like the addition of the barbarians making themselves much more than a simple/major annoyance. They actually build cities now. Not just wander the globe causing mayhem. I found entire continents with little more than barbarian cities. That was a nice addition. AND they were almost always invariably the best computer players, as far as advancing in techs. They were almost always just behind me, where the other computer players were decades if not centuries behind.

Civ II will be missed, but Civ 4 is good enough.. For now.

I agree, just for curiosity sake. I'd think that they could release them as betas if nothing else.

I am not real sure how many times they started over or even what engine they are presently using but I'd like to see the Quake and Unreal versions.

I looked at Unreal 1 the other day. It still looks good. Especially compared to the early versions of Quake and HL1 from the same era.

I don't think they truly got far enough in the Quake version to have anything playable however, so an anthology might be out of the question.. *shrugs*