I was going to add this as a reply to the warzone thread, but then decided that Alpha Centauri definitely deserves its own thread
Alpha Centauri is my second favorite game of all time, right after Starcraft. God I love that game. Nwabudike Morgan (or however you spell it) the laissez faire capitalist was my favorite character. It was so great getting a maxed out economic rating and getting huge energy bonuses in all your cities. I would actually outright purchase great projects using my huge energy banks. Damn, I really need to look around and find those CDs for it.
Alien Crossfire the expansion pack was mediocre though. It's definitely worth it if you can find it now, and I wouldn't complain except that I actually dropped $50 on it when it was new, and it required the original game. The alien factions were very cool, because they were eternally at war and totally changed the gameplay by forcing everyone to pick a side. But other than the aliens, the new characters were either too similar to existing ones or just generally lame. The cyborg was really similar to Zakharov the academic, and the religion of Planet boy was similar to Lady Gaia. The pirate and the hacker were just lame characters. The aliens created interesting gameplay, but they were way too annoying to listen to. I realize they all added variety and had their own gameplay niches, especially the pirate, who started off in the water, but there was so much strategy variety already with the different governments and budget management. What was just as important if not more so to me is that the characters have a unique identity and seemed like real personalities with real motivations, which all the original characters did, but in the expansion pretty much just the religion of Planet boy did.
The original characters were fleshed out extremely well, like how they gave quotes from essays they had written. There were quotes from Morgan's
The Ethics of Greed and Sister Miriam Goodwinson's
But for the Grace of God, among others. When I played I usually included either all seven of the original characters or give of them plus the two new alien factions.
I realize that the games are very long, which makes multiplayer games generally impractical, and to be honest I'm not even sure I would want to, but does anybody have any interest in possibly playing one? My final exams are this coming week, and then I'm on Winter break.
Topic: Alpha Centauri (Read 3656 times)
