Yin has Civ3!: Let the testing begin ...

[yin26]

[THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR A FULL REVIEW]

As King Pessimist, I feel I have to run the release version through the paces. So I will. And I will be fair ... if critical (as always). I *do* want to like the game, so I am approaching it with that mindset.

Now, I am still waiting for Korn's review before I say anything, since he will no doubt do a bang up job over the weekend. I'll be pretty busy myself, but I hope to put in a few hours of play tonight.

I will not come to any conclusions for a while, however.

BUT: To my European/Asian friends or to anybody wondering how big the pdf manual is: I have zipped it, and it now weighs in at 1.5MB.

In the meantime, I think every other thread has already answered any questions, so I'll just ramble here for a while and post a full review several days from now, depending on my work schedule. If there is anything in specific you would like me to test, I can try ... though the first few games I think I'll just be figuring out the interface, etc.

[Grim Legacy]

LOL.

I thought you would wait until the bargain bin Gold Edition. Why am I not surprised?

[yin26]

Ah, yes, a good point:

I am currently playing a copy 'on loan' from my computer guy here in Korea. He owns a small shop near one of my bus stops, and he has seen me many times over the years. He said:

"If you like the game, come back and buy it. Keep the disks a few weeks if you need."

So, total amount paid so far: $0

[yin26]

By the way, I've now had 3 fatal crashes. The first I figured was because I was running stuff in the background. But the last two give me this message:

"Unable to allocate draw buffer."

I am assuming this is the graphics card problem.

Not a good start.

[Adm.Naismith]

Smart move, I have to talk to a friend of mine to see if anything like this can be arranged (the borrow of game, not the crash )

Take your time to write a fair review, or the tigers roaring around (hardcore believers fan) will eat you alive

[yin26]

Yeah, this guy is cool. He's let me do this before. I think he gets eval copies or something ...

Anyway: Just had my 4th hard crash. Total system lock-up. Same error message (actually, I'm assuming, since it wouldn't even display the error message). Now, to give you an idea of how fair I'm trying to be, I will try to sort this out. I've already freed up system resources, so that's not it.

Off to troubleshoot. So far:

[Grim Legacy]

I have had one Civ3 crash so far. Had nothing running in the background. Win98SE did not crash with it, could restart the sys and resume.

Occured after loading a game.

[Ecthy]

Thing is though, Yin, just that you were ranting beforehands doesn't make your opinion more important than that of others. Just imagine everyone would open a thread like this

Why not post in the threads that have been opened already, dedicated to the lower class

[Zanzin]

Rofl, I couldn't believe that Yin had actually bought civ3!!! So when I saw that he'd got in load for free, it suddenly made a lot more sense.

I eagerly await your review yin!

[yin26]

Ecthelion: Feel free to ignore the thread, then. I have been criticized in the past for not playing a game (CtP in that case) and not giving a review. And as the President of the Pessimists' Club, I have to make a showing.

Zanzin: LOL Yes, I would not buy the game just yet. But if Korn's review looks good, I just might.

A few great little things I noticed about the game:

1. The end game replay looks awesome!
2. And so does the Historical Rating screen!

Both are quite funny and light-hearted. I saw them when I 'retired' from the tutorial. More on that later.

Anyway, as you can see, I hope I fixed the crash problem. I updated the driver on my Radeon DDR 32Mb ... seemed to work ... though I could have just been lucky.

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by Zanzin
Rofl, I couldn't believe that Yin had actually bought civ3!!! So when I saw that he'd got in load for free, it suddenly made a lot more sense.

Oh how quaint, I thought it just made his earlier claims regarding the purchase void. =]

[Faboba]

You can rely on two things about Yin :

He's not an idiot
He will say exactly what he thinks, particularly if it will annoy a great many people

Don't suppose you could upload that 1.5 MB zipped version to a web server or something?

[Jason Beaudoin]

Faboda: Didn't I take care of that for you?

BTW, I had my first crash last night, and as it happens, the save file was corrupted (I'm sending this to Firaxis).

But, mostly the game runs very, very well, and I have the exact same video card as Yin. Luckily for me, I updated my video drivers before getting the game.

[yin26]

I updated my video drivers before getting the game.

Good man. It looks like you saved yourself some headache.

[kittenOFchaos]

What system are you running it on Yin?

I'm sure we could probably work at at what specifications this game has no problems running:

I have a pentium 4, 1.6 Ghz, with 32 Mb graphics card and 512 MB ram and 40 GB hard disk.

My system is EXTREMELY stable...I feel that if civ3 crashes on my system that the game may have some issues here...roll on November the 8th.


Strange relationship you have with that computer dude yin