<p>D has ben playing Civilization IV on her computer (a Mac, if that matters) and mentioned that there is a new edition (V) that she might want to buy sometime. Thinking that I might surprise her with it as a Christmas gift, I looked at the game on Amazon, and the reviews seem pretty bad. </p>
<p>What I am wondering is, might the bad reviewers be the very serious gamers? Anyone with college kids who like the new version? Also, I see that there are several expansion packs . . . anyone with an opinion on those?</p>
<p>Son says AI was bad and balance was bad when first released, but he thinks there are patches available. He says it plays more like a traditional war game than Civ 4 did. </p>
<p>He was pretty seriously involved with Civ 4 in high school having worked on the programming of some mod that was voted best of the year in Gamer’s Magazine, but he’s moved on to other games.</p>
<p>amesie, my BF has apparently been playing the demo version of that game and seems to really like it. he hasn’t bought the game yet but I think it’s on his list of things to do. he said if i needed any ideas for Christmas I could pick up a copy for him. My understanding is it’s a turned base game so it kind of evens the playing field between serious gamers and non serious gamers. He’s 32 and not a big giant huge video game head but seems to like that one.</p>
<p>A couple of years ago he was playing two dimensional old fashioned looking arcade style games. At the moment he’s playing Braid and WOW and various other things. I know he liked at least one of the Call of Duty games, and both my kids thought Portal was brilliant. (We wouldn’t pay for stuff like WOW in high school, but he has plenty of his own money now.)</p>