NOTE: These are posts I made on Cohost, and where I started talking about the games I mastered, as I mastered them. They are out of order for this reason. I’m going through and posting all my old content, so this is the oldest one even though it’s #43. Okay back to the review.

Civilization

I said the other day I might start doing this. Well, I’m doing this. I’m on a website called Retro Achievements, which true to its name, puts achievements on old retro games. I’ve been working on “mastering” (read: getting all the achievements on) a bunch of games, and currently I’m at #43, Civilization 1 for the SNES.

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Now, I am a HUGE Civilization fan. I started playing the series in the early 2000s with an old copy of Civ 2 Gold on my windows 98 PC. That shit Whips. I did go back and play Civ 1, and played a few games of it to completion, but always saw it as generally inferior to Civ 2. Which tbf, it is. Civ 2 is essentially just Civ 1 with more features and a slightly better AI, it’s not like going from Civ 5 to Civ 6 where they changed a bunch of concepts around.

I did not know that Civ 1 got ported to the SNES though! And apparently neither did a LOT of people. I streamed this on my stream, and a bunch of people were like “this exists?!”, but I did have a few people go “YO I HAD THIS AS A KID, I LOVED THIS GAME”. I bet if I had had this, I’d have ADORED it.

It was made by Koei, who was THE company you’d want to hire for a port like this. Koei made a lot of strategy games on consoles, and I hate pretty much all of them. All of the games they made were really stupidly complex with lots of fiddly menus and IMO are NOT made for a console. You should not be playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms with a gamepad. Civ is different though. Yes, you can use a SNES mouse, but I actually did not. I used my gamepad, and it was perfectly enjoyable. A little slow paced, yes. It’d not the way I’d personally play this game, but there’s no DOS retro achievements (YET) so I had to do this version lol

This version is pretty great! Civ 1 is of course a fun game, though dated and a little primitive, and this version is faithful in almost every way. It adds a weird goddess to the beginning that reminds me of E.V.O., but that’s okay. And some systems feel like they just kinda don’t work. My cities were FILLED with pollution pips, but I never saw a single pollution tile, and I played through three games of this. But other than that, it works great.

As for the set itself, it was a LITTLE grindy. Get all of the wonders, that’s fine, you get so far ahead of the AI in this even playing on the hardest difficulty. Research some things before they were researched IRL, that’s fine too. I wish there was an achievement for “learn to fly before you learn what gravity is”, because that’s a thing I did. Researching Math before 3000BC was the only one that gave me trouble, cause math isn’t super useful early game so I had to do a specific game just for that. Then there’s the achievements for beating the game, on Earth, on an Ice Age Map, and on the hardest difficulty with 7 civilizations. Really easy, tbh. Just play as the Americans on the Earth map, you’re very isolated. The Aztecs did spawn, but I easily destroyed them by rushing them down, and could build up for a science victory without being hassled.

This game is also really succeptible to save scumming. Save scumming the villages, save scumming battles, it’s amazingly easy.

The only achievements that were actually a hassle were the ones for wiping out every tribe. All 14 of them. And you can only start a game with 7. However, in Civ 1, if a civilization is wiped out early enough, a new one will spawn. This is useful for these achievements but WOW was it annoying for the World Domination victory achievement, cause civs kept spawning in places I already found.

Over all though, a fun version of Civ, and a really fun game. Took me 14 hours of gameplay to master. I probably wouldn’t go back to this version, but I’m glad I checked it out. There’s no achievements for Civ 2 on the PS1 on RA yet. I’m considering maybe devving those myself, tbh. It seems like a challenge, but the game is so fine I don’t think I’d mind.