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#90 IT'S ALL ABOUT THE CUSTOMIZATION DarthVeda looks at the simplicity he sees in customizing CivII any which way. #91 HAVE THE FORUMS TAKEN OVER ME? Iain Lindley is worried about where his forum addiction will take him. #92 THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION Timothy Weij worries about Sid's Dino game evolving as a RTS title. #93 CIVILIZATION & ITS DISCONTENTS Mark Everson evaluates Civilization II's rough edges. #94 A RECOVERED APOLYTOLIC'S MESSAGE LordStone shares his experience battling an addiction to a gaming site. COLUMN ARCHIVE

I laid back one night last summer and wondered just what had happened to those dreams of Civilization 2 I had had. Feeling a sense of accomplishment at building my first Wonder of the World, The Hanging Gardens, I needed to see and listen to the movies again. So, with everyone sleeping and dreaming of (hopefully) saner things, I felt like turning my computer on...

It was to be a long night. I remember it well. Again, I built The Hanging Gardens as my first wonder, and only after I had seen the movie in all its majesty did I realise my speakers were plugged in, the time was almost four o'clock in the morning, and I had a pang of guilt at how my family could now be awake because of it.

Still, I continued playing. I broke my record of building 21 cities before the birth of Christ. This time I built 22. A remarkable achievement, made all the more worthy as the cities were extensively developed with irrigration and roads. What a start! I continued...

I got to The Statue Of Liberty and built it immediately in York with my savings. Just as immediately, I held a blood-thirsty revolution and introduced to my people the enlightened notion of Fundamentalism. And how they loved it...not a single unhappy person in sight. As I thought back to life again, thinking at how my personal aim was to make as many people happy as possible, I was quite thrilled to replicate this ideal in Civ2.

But oh no, as my Explorer roamed the land, he came upon not one army, but perhaps three or four heading towards The Hanging Gardens and Birmingham. I launched a huge defensive force. But it didn't work. As the swarms of Chinese grabbed the city at Size 2, I wiped a musketeer from my eye.

My dream wasn't real - my civilisation was not omnipotent as I had imagined. It gave me a wake up call to get up from here and do something worthwhile. How confusing dreams can be.

Glimpsing over at my black monitor from my bed, I quickly realised that my dream was both real and unreal, and I had things to do...

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Author's quote - "Civilization 2 is the curse of the insomniac classes"

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