I think there is some lying going on.

I have yet been able to finish a game, due to the game crashing when it gets too much for my PC to handle (I have a P4 2.6, 1 Gig RAM, 128mb ATI 9800 Pro), yet I still find this game fun. I have d/l the memory leak fix, the patch, and even turned down the settings (low graphics, no zoom-in fighting, etc). The game is still full of issues, but I still find enjoyment from it. I am even saving money to buy a better comp to run it! That says a lot if you ask me.

 

Thanks for the responses, folks.

""Wow, if that doesn't indicate that someone is a repeat troll...""
btw, this thread is the only one I posted this year. ass/u/me

1Gig memory here, 256mb nvidia, everything updated, no probs in dxdiag.

Shivam, did you play a large/huge map to the end of the game on both pcs?

 

Of course. Any review that scored the game too high for your tastes is "fanboi review", written by inept people with no clue, who gave the game that score just because it's Civ.

Ìt couldn't POSSIBLY be people that actually had the game working well enough on their system, and LIKING it very much because, as far as gameplay goes, it quite the solid game.

Nope. Can't EVER be that - after all, that'd mean that other people would be entitled to opinion other than yours without necessarily being morons for having such opinions.

Some of us actually really like the game, for its own sake.

 

Hey, by definition I'm a lurker. Apparently.

I've just not been lurking enough to notice I'm being called a lurker it seems.
If I get on my high horse and start getting annoyed about that you guys will just call me a troll. Is this correct?

Lack of posts/long membership/guest = lurker?

What if you are a lurker and a troll? What are you called?

I really don't like that troll poster I find it offensive.

People use the internet differently and not everyone conforms to the norm. Surely those are facts?

 

If the game's fun, I honestly love playing regardless of bugs so long as I can find a workaround. After all, why else would anyone ever want to play a Beta Test but to get to play the game sooner, bugs or no?

I recognize the dissatisfaction of those that can't / couldn't even get the game running. If you can get it running, though, I'm one of the people who likes playing sooner rather than waiting longer while the last bugs are fixed. So long as they're fixed, which Fireaxis is doing (unlike *cough* EA).

Just be glad Civ wasn't bought out by Electronic Arts *shuddder*

You'd likely end up with a game released 6 months earlier, no bug fixes, and a useless "Sim Mode!" to give your units personalities. Sort of like what they did to SimCity

 

I didn't see anyone call you a lurker... (as you can see, I've been lurking around this thread, hehe)

Lurking isn't a bad thing, I do it all the time, just kinda shows that you enjoy reading posts and don't really say much unless you've got something relevant to say.

My relevant thing to say here is that being a lurker isn't a bad thing, not by anyone's definition I'd think.

I'll help you out on the definitions real quick. Lurker = someone who reads the boards, but doesn't post often. Just a quiet dude. Troll = someone who posts inflammatory stuff. Tries to offend people, picks fights, and is just a person nobody wants around. They're 2 totally different things.

PS: I was thinking a person who's both a lurker and a troll could be a lurkell.


Edit: Sorry, I didn't mean to neglect the original post. I figure a lot of the ratings on those websites are based on the game when it's working as it should. So long as it's playable it's a real good game. But I agree that the bugginess of the game should be taken into account some, if not in the rating, at least in the description of the game, on those sites. I mean, a Ferrari's a great car, but not so good if it constantly breaks down.

 

Reviewers are not the same as hardcore fans. They play the game for a few hours, compare it to other games they have to review, and move on to the next game without noticing all the little things that us fanatics notice.

(I'm speaking generally, this is obviously not always true.)

 

Yes, exactly. I stand by the fact that 10/10 for Civ4 is a meaningless fanboi review by a person with no capacity if even a comprehension for objectivity.

10/10 = perfect.

I really like this game. Amusing how many fanboi's assume anyone who doesn't give it 10/10 hates it. It's a great game.

Some games are arguably potentially 10/10. Civilisation (I & II, obviously not 3), Baldur's Gate, Dune II, a number - whatever. Civ4 is obviously not one of those games. Maybe it will be with enough patches, but that's not what a review should reflect (or pretends to reflect).

All the 'professional' [again...sic] Civ4 reviews deliberately avoid giving appropriate weight if any at all to the negative aspects of the game. The whole point of a review is to cover the good, the bad, and the ugly. If it does not do so, it is not a review, but rather a testimonial or other sad infomercial-like advertisement.

Fortunately, I didn't waste any time reading your review as it clearly would not have proven informative at all. This trend is exactly why reading the low player reviews and posts has unfortunately become a neccessary part of making a truly informed decision for any big name games. Unfortunate because you have to read a number of them to form an accurate picture of the ugly side.

This appears the whole point of the OP.

 

Probably need to law to prevent all this lurking. Sort of like peeping tom laws, number of posts divided by membership time in days gets you a lurker rating and an ankle monitor for anything under .25? LOLUproariously.

Seriously, as someone who has been devoping software in about 6 or 7 environments for longer than I care to say (punched cards and paper tapes, remote TTY time-share access anyone?), these things regularly boil down to testing. And that is a function of time or monetary budgets.

My guess is the budget for hardware variations close to minimum specs was too small or slashed for some reason (most likeley). Or the delivery path was weighted on coding not testing (bad choice).

Blaming reviewers with even smaller time/money budgets may miss the point. It's the deveoping and maerketing companies that need to test.

(Although I could use a trip to Bermuda in January to review the next game if someone would like to send me )

 

With reviews averaging at about 92%, I find Civ4 very appropriately rated. There's no conspiracy going on. It's just a very good game.

Technical problems should be mentioned in a proper review, but are no reason to lessen the score unless everyone (or at least most people) are effected by them, which just isn't the case. These are bound to change anyways, partly because they are solved by patches, partly because new hardware will introduce new problems in the years to come.

That said, I don't think that complex strategy games are tested as thoroughly by reviewers as they should. The quality of a strategy game is much harder to evaluate than the quality of an action shooter. But no one will be willing to pay a reviewer for spending three weeks exclusively with one game.

I also think that there *are* sites that can be trusted. And some that can't. For example. I don't trust IGN any more after they gave MoO3 a 92% rating. Another example: There's a German games magazine (usually trustable) which gave WoW a very high score, while at the same time publishing an "WoW strategy booklet". Clear conflict of interests, I didn't trust the high rating. However, I do trust QT3, who had the courage to expose MoO3 as the lemon it was, at a time were all other previews were still positive. It's like everywhere else: You have to look carefully and pick your sources of information. Lamenting about the state of the world may relieve you for a short while, but won't help you to make better decisions in the future.

 

I have the same tastes and I guess the same kind of computer that those lieing reviewers have.
Never a hitch, totally the game I wanted and expected. Between my 14 year old son and myself it has been played probably 200 hours without a hitch.

From my point of view this is all a conspiracy to slight a game that is demonstratably perfect.
With the patch it will be 11 out of 10 cause I like the sound of lots of the changes even though i didnt ask for them.

 

Personally, I don't think its just the score that makes a review informative or not. a 10/10 "its perfect" is no better or worse than a 2/10 "It sucks". I'll read a long 10/10 review to see what features the person really liked. I'll also read a 5/10 to see what problems other people had. Unfortunately I pre-ordered Civ4 before I knew that the mac version would be coming out next year. Given the problems most laptop users had (including me on mine), I probably would have waited a few months and not bought the PC version.

 

Yeah, companies always say bad things about their products in advertisements. Can't understand why Firaxis wouldn't want to make a negative ad about Civ4.

 

When people cannot enjoy themself with a game they either quit or go to the games forums to complain, this is how the majority of the posters ended up here and this might be what you have gotten your "bad" impressions from, a lot of happy customers dont specially go out to the boards to complain their having a great time.

 

Right on, my thinking exactly.


Just for the heck of it I took a little sampling of some reviews, to see if their content mentioned anything about the performance issues. I gotta admit, I can see why the OP saw a bias.

The reviews I checked out were from a post on the front page of this website, the first group of reviews that come up, the latest entries basically. Out of the seven reviews, (Digital Entertainment 9.5/10, PGNx Media 9.3/10, Game Axis 9/10, Gamer Dad 4.5/5, Game Chronicles 9/10, Voodoo Extreme 9/10, The Journal Gazette (no rating)), only one of them (Gamer Dad) makes mention of people experiencing problems running the game. One other, Voodoo Extreme I think, mentions lagginess toward the end of the game. Aside from that, nobody had anything bad to say.

The truth is, there ARE a decent number of people having serious problems running this game, they may be a vocal minority, but they are a decent amount. In addition to those with serious problems, almost all of us have at least a slight problem, like difficulty playing games on large or huge maps. And that's running the game well above the advertised minimum specs. For a review to not mention those kinds of things is wrong, imo. I understand the reviewers have a lot of games to go through, and most of them base their reviews only on their personal experience playing the game, and don't bother checking into this sort of thing... but it's still pretty misleading. Judging by 5 of those 7 reviews, you'd this this game ran 100% perfectly, without a hitch, no matter what.

Like Psyringe said, unless the vast majority of people were having serious trouble running the game, it shouldn't affect the ratings reviewers give the game. It may be wrong, but if I'm browsing through a list of ratings, I'm more than likely going to ignore a game that gets a 6/10 or lower. If it's a 9/10, I'll go ahead and read the review, which is what a game like Civ 4 deserves. But, the review should definitely make mention of the potential technical problems.

Guess you just need to make sure you find a website that's reliable and objective. Good to know for the next time I'm looking to buy a game.

 

I'm a gamer, it works for me, it HAS worked FINE since day one.

Just because YOUR computer has problems doesn't mean that the rest of us can't be enjoying it!

 

"Agree with me, or you're an idiot"

Is it really so hard to accept that people having different opinion than yours does NOT make them idiots, fanboys, or meaningless?

I don't think, personally, that this game is a 10/10. It has some flaws, although not nearly as many (IN MY OPINION) as you would believe looking at this forum. Many of them, on top of everything else, have nothing to do with the game itself, but rather with the impossibility of testing the game with every system specs out there (the various "game not working" issues), or with Take-Two blundering at the publishing step (french posters, mis-labeled discs).

On top of that, while there were quite a few design flaws in the 1.0 version, these flaws appears to be the result of the rushed release. That doesn't mean they're not flaws, but it does mean that, given Firaxis' track record on C3's patching work, we can expect these flaws to be massively improved (and behold, the new patch covered a lot of gound on adressing many of these flaws).

Still, it's not - IN MY OPINION - a perfect game - the navy is undervalued again, among other things, and there are some flaws that might prove hard, if not impossible to fix, albeit they're not major ones.

But just because I think this game score around the mid-nineties doesn't mean I have a right to start insulting people who want to score it higher or lower. They're entitled to think the naval is irrelevant, or conversedly to think they're worth a much bigger penalty than I went for. They're entitled to disagree with me on what is a flaw. They're also entitled to ignore Firaxis's track record on patching.

What nobody's entitled to is lobbing name like "fanboi" and "whiners" around to people who disagree with them on how good the game is. That sorts of arrogance shows a complete lack of respect and civility.

 

Good point, Oda, but I'm afraid you're probably wasting your breath.

I find that the type of folks who tend to throw those labels around generally don't even understand the concepts of respect and civility, much less lack them.

For those keeping score, count me amongst the "fanbois", my copy of cIV works great, on several differently configured systems, and Firaxis is one of the few companies I'll buy games from sight unseen, no reviews necessary.

 

It's typical for reviewers not to address technical problems. It makes sense when you think about it, because those are bound to be corrected in due time, and normally the site won't make another review after that's done, so they make the first and only review in a way that it's as valid as possible 1 month, 3 months, a year after the game comes out.

 

That's why I think technical issues shouldn't affect the rating: The situation is bound to change anyways.

However, it wouldn't hurt if a review stated that *at the time the review was written*, there were some technical problems associated with the game. This would help the people who think about buying the game *now*, and would not invalidate the review in the future (since the rating isn't affected, and people who read the review in three years will know that the situation may have changed - they'll probably look if the game was patched, which isn't at all a bad course of action).