UPDATE:
I got the game working finally. Turns out there's some odd problem with unpacking the assets file on load. This thread outlines how to fix the renderer error if you have up to date drivers and directx...
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=4090697&t=1441#post4090697
There are certain games out there that bring back a flood of memories with just the mention of their name. These games are the cornerstones of PC and video games, and anyone who considers themselves anything of a gamer has probably played them at one time or another... and very likely become addicted to them, forfeiting sleep, food, work and loved ones all to squeeze in just one more level/boss/turn. These are the games that cause us to flunk a class, to get reprimanded at work for showing up looking like something the cat dragged in, that get us in serious trouble with our significant others for not spending enough "quality time" with them.
In short, these are the games that either got us into gaming, or what keep us firmly where we are in the hobby.
Through a combination of addictive gameplay, compelling gimmicks, sometimes story, but often just depth and complexity of the game, these magical games hold a special place in our hearts.
These are my most treasured games... These are games that I pulled all-nighters for, the ones that set the gold standard for all games I played thereafter.
Myst |
Warcraft (1/2) |
Starcraft |
Mario (All NES) |
| Tetris |
Master of Orion 2 |
Mega Man (All NES) |
Sonic The Hedgehog |
| Baldur's Gate (1/2) |
Command & Conquer |
Doom 2 |
The Legend of Zelda (all) |
Then there's the game this whole post is really going to be about.... Civilization.
The Civ series is the gold standard for empire building games. You take the reigns over one of the great civilizations of history and lead them from a small tribe in the stone age, to hopefully the most powerful nation on the planet (or you get to Alpha Centauri before anyone else). Civ 1 came out well before my time as a PC gamer so I missed out on that. I came to the series for Civ 2 and was hooked. I wasted hours and hours of my evenings and weekends playing the game, never managing to actually win the game because I was too busy clicking "Turn" to build a unit and ignored the strategy of the game. Civ 2 was a blast anyway, and I played the expansions, and eventually started kicking around the Open Source clone, FreeCiv (which never quite felt like a Civ game to me... something was just missing).
Well, I spent my time with Civ 2, but like most games, time went by and I eventually uninstalled and moved on. Sometime around my sophomore year in college though, a new Civ game came out... Civ 3, and it promised bigger, better, shinier everything. So after a bit of hemming and hawing and debating whether the money would be better spent on beer, I trudged to the store in the dead of winter and picked up a copy in a nice metal tin box. It was neat.
Civ 3 rekindled that sort of obsessive "next turn" mentality that can eat hours of life but only seem like a few moments had passed. I played... and I played... and I played some more. I missed classes because I was too far in "the zone" and forgot about such minor items such as grades, exams and homework. I did this for probably about a month before I realized what was happening. Since I had picked up Civ 3, I went from an A- in Statistics to a solid D, from a B+ in Economics to a C- (for required classes, I had to pull a C or better, so the C- wouldn't fly). I was starting to fail classes because I was playing a freaking computer game! So, I did the only thing I could do, I took the CD out of my computer, handed it to my roommate and told her she couldn't give me the CD back until the semester ended.
That decision saved my grades that semester, without a doubt.
After that I never really picked the game up again, always afraid of what would happen if I got sucked in again. So, it was with mixed emotions that I reacted to the news of a new Civ game coming out this year. Civ 4 promised the bigger better newer experience again, and looked to deliver on it even better than Civ 3 did. If this game is indeed better than Civ 3, does that mean it'll be more addictive? More detrimental to my already imaginary social life? Well, being the good little gamer I am, there was only one way to find out... buy the game and play it!
So, yesterday (10/26) I headed over to the local EB during lunch and grabbed one of the copies fresh out of the UPS box. It was launch day for a major game, of course I have to get one of the first copies. So, game in hand I drive home, pop the CDs in and install.
1pm - Game is installed... pop in the "Play" disc (Disc 2) and fire the game up, ready to be sucked into this new game.
Error... unable to find game CD, please insert the play disc.
Umm... I have the play disc in. I eject and put the cd back in, thinking the drive was having trouble reading it....
Error... unable to find game CD, please insert the play disc.
Very strange... well, let me see if there's any docs on the first disc about this. Pop in Disc 1 (Install) and up comes a launcher... Odd says I, that the non play disc would have the play launcher. So I click Play just for the heck of it.
(Note, there was evidently a production error that resulted in a bunch of CD sets being mislabled, if you get Civ 4, the first disc is the one you need to have in the drive to play.)
Well, it fires up the initial load box to let me know that the game is loading the XML file definitions, initializing audio, network etc. Then it says "Init Engine" (initialize renderer engine), the screen goes blank to load the game itself now, flickers, the BAM, back to the desktop I go.
Error: Failed to initialize renderer: Check your video drivers and DirectX version
Weird... I know I have the latest version of the ATI drivers (5.10) and DirectX (9.0c) so that shouldn't be a problem. I try a few more times to make sure it wasn't a weird glitch, but it always dumps with the same error. So, off I go to the forums to see if there might be a patch or some known bug.
For the next 3 hours I sit on the CivFanatics and Apolyton forums talking with other people who are having the same issue as I am. Turns out, everyone who is having trouble and getting the renderer error are ATI card users. The only nVidia card user who came on the thread was running an old GeForce 2 that didn't meet minimum requirements. We all tried different driver versions, tried reinstalling DirectX, everything we could think of in case it was an error on our end of things, like maybe we botched a driver install at some point and that's killing the game.
I tried installing Catalyst 5.7, 5.8, 5.9 and 5.10, as well as a few of the OmegaDriver sets. No luck
I tried reinstalling DirectX from the game CD. No luck.
I called TakeTwo phone support and got nothing back of value from them
I turned on logging in the game's ini file hoping to get a meaningful error message back. Nothing useful.
It was now around 5pm and I had spent 4 hours working on this problem (so much for work huh? Well, I did meetings via the phone while reinstalling drivers and rebooting) and onto the one thread about all the driver reinstall attempts (it was 6 pages long at this point) comes the lead designer of the game from Firaxis, and he suggests we all install the latest ATI drivers (5.10).... which was what the ENTIRE THREAD was about and how it didn't work. I don't think he read any of the thread before posting, and it honestly pissed a lot of people off. It's like calling your Cablemodem support line, they ask you if you've reset the modem, you say yes, then they tell you to again anyway, as if they don't believe that you did it, or that you're capable of doing it properly.
Just to humor him, I did it again, and still no luck. I posted my results back. The fix didn't work for any of us, and we knew it wouldn't since it was the first thing everyone had tried hours earlier. After all the driver reinstalls I figured the only thing that had remained constant (aside from my Windows install) was the game install, so I uninstalled and reinstalled that.
Fired up the game again to see if that fixed it.
Error... unable to find game CD, please insert the play disc.
I had the right CD in, but just for fun I put the other one in. Still no dice. Great, now not only will the game not render, it won't even find the CD! I was digging deeper and deeper. I uninstall and reinstall a few more times, and it's still not working. Finally, after chatting for a while with a Firaxis developer (Trip, you rock) I try rolling back my drivers.
On the last driver install, I got 5.10 with the Catalyst Control Center stuff. This time to make it quicker I downloaded the 5.8 DRIVER ONLY installer and out that in. Boom, the CD worked again. Something between SecuROM 4 and the Control Center had botched things up and left me unable to even start the game.
But I was still at the render problem.
At 10:30 last night, I gave up and went to bed. Chatting with Trip, we learned that this problem seems pretty random for ATI cards and they haven't been able to reproduce the problem internally yet. He told us Take2 and Firaxis were going to be kicking it into high gear first thing in the morning to get the problem resolved fast since this was affecting a significant chunk of the customer base. Hopefully a hotfix will be coming down today or early tomorrow... I really want to play this game!
As I was shutting down for the night, I realized that I had just spent five and a half hours pouring over driver installs, dll files, directx readmes, SecuROM info sheets, forums and had been in regular contact with developers on the game team trying to fix a game I had just bought.
I was doing *work* to play a *game*
THAT my friends, is the sign of an addiction 