gamerdad No thanks to Youtube I found myself watching the latest in depth video about the next version of Civilization, the seventh instalment due early next year in February. Of course, my next best option to playing a game that won’t come out for six months is to dig back into some #ps5 Civilization 6.

Anyway. The last few times I’ve played I’ve been mucking around with the custom game settings. Call me a casual gamer, but sometimes I just like to play in a more creative way, so toning down the difficulty and the aggression of the ai is about the only way to turn this into a builder type game versus the all out campaign of military and religious warfare. Sometimes I just like to build big cities and explore, y’know?

Tonight I was randomly assigned to be the great ancient civilization of Australia, which disappointingly had nothing to do with the mighty aboriginal cultures but instead just the regular modern crocodile dundee aussies. I may need to find the mute button to keep up this save file tho—there’s only so many times I can listen to Waltzing Matilda playing in the background, ugh.

gamerdad Getting over the supposed subtlety of the latest update, I’m just revelling in the fact that it distracted me from my other adventures. While I should be down in our cool cool basement where my computer is flying a virtual plane across North Dakota, instead I find myself upstairs in my hot hot living room where the #ps5 lives so that I can add a couple more hours to my NMS playtime tally. Of course it never fails to awe me that I can spend a couple hours in this universe and discover this near limitless variety of colours and shapes and sights just by flying a spaceship from planet to planet. In fact, sometimes just waiting a few minutes for a storm to clear or for the time of day to shift, the whole feel of a place will change.

gamerdad I think this was my fifth full play thru since installing this classic on #ps5 a couple weeks ago. I kinda found myself getting into an obsessive groove trying to win this thing on some measure. I would play a great game and then some group I’d barely met on the other side of the map would come up the middle for a culture win or something out of left field. My concession to my own sanity was to turn off all win conditions except for a total point victory. Managing this thing on a console with a controller versus a keyboard makes juggling five different win conditions almost untenable. That said, I still tried to play a balanced game. I founded a custom religion and defended my cities against evangelical takeover. I completed the space race and settled Mars. I built a whole bunch of cultural districts and created nearly twenty works of art/culture. And when some group picked a fight with me and declared war against one of my cities, I took the real low road and started nuking and razing their cities until they begged for a peace deal. I think the only thing I really didn’t excel at was Wonder building, but when the ideal time came round for that I happened to be quite busy trying to keep up a holy war, so… excuses excuses, huh? Overall, I think I might shelf this one for a while now that I trounced at least one round. We’ll see. It is a pretty zen game for those quiet days at home.

gamerdad I probably own this game on a couple other platforms but it is honestly one of those awesome titles that doesn’t hurt to keep handy for when one needs to dive deep into a game zen state. So when the platinum edition showed up on sale on #ps5 (well, technically ps4) this week for like 80% off I thought I should add it to my library and (of course) play a few hours. I’ve been playing Civ since version 1 and I’ve killed so many hours of my life building and defending cities that I should probably call myself a Civ veteran, but I’ll keep things updated as I dabble in a console version of this classic for the first time ever.

gamerdad My foray back into the Tt LEGO-verse has taken me into the vast and nostalgic Star Wars world. #ps5 As with any game it’s good to find the tools early on that support and multiply your efforts, so that I’ve literally dug into to upgrades like the stud multiplier and the bonus radars within the first chapters of my play is probably not surprising. And with all nine movies to work through, I’ve opted for the boring but gen-x approach of release order. Episodes IV and V are in the bag!