Geek Update Part 3 - Gaming

In what I think will be my last of the Geek Update series of posts I think I'll talk a bit about what I've been playing of late.

About a month or so ago I got a few more games for the PS3 - Little Big Planet and Prince of Persia. Both have seem some play time, but not very much. I really like Prince of Persia, I like running around and stuff, but sometimes it can feel a little too like an endless series of press x now, and press o now. It just gets a little grating whenever I spend much more than an hour on it. Little Big Planet has seen even less of my time but I'm honestly not sure why. I think I just game so little that I find it hard to juggle more than one game at a time. And when I say I don't game much I mean no more than 3 hours a week maybe. I just don't seem to find the time.... And yet I have found a couple of hours over the last week to post some silly Geek flavoured updates?

I have also been playing Civilisation 4: Colonisation on the PC. This is a bit of an odd one. Every so often I get hankerings to pick up Civ 4 again. It never goes anywhere, I always get bored a few hours in and loose interest. But on hearing Colonisation had much tighter game play I was interested enough to pick it up. I really like turn based strategy games, I suppose from a background of RPG's and Boardgames, but I've never quite found the perfect one. Colonisation is, unfortunately, not it. But it come so very very close, it was only at the end of sinking another 45 minutes into it this lunchtime that I realised it was not to be.

Essentially it is a much tighter game. You don't have to worry about religion, tech levels, or having warriors when everyone else has tanks. And it has some neat little mechanics in that any of your population units can do anything (farm/ improvements/cigar making/etc) but some are better at one thing than others. It reminds me so much of games like Porto Rico (in a very good way). But its just too long. I realised today I was maybe halfway through my first game and have been playing it for 2 or 3 weeks now. Maybe clocked as much as 10 hours or something. And I'm going slower now than I did at the start. Arrg. I could try shorten game length with tweaked setting but its just not going to make such a difference. Its a shame, if I'd finished a game by now I'd have probably been playing this game for years to come, but alas, it is not to be.