Game Overview

Developer: Firaxis
Publisher: Infogrames
Civilization III Official Page: www.civ3.com

Genesis 1:1

Before First-Person Shooters, Real-Time Strategy, Massively-Mulitplayer Online RPGs, e-mail, and the Internet, there was Sid Meier’s Civilization.

And it was good.

So good in fact, that Civilization was the standard to judge all other games by. Every time you played a game you’d have to ask yourself, “Is this as addictive as Civilization? Do I play this as much as Civilization? Do I spend every waking moment thinking about it like Civilization?” If a game even came close to being as good as Civ it was a great game.

As time went on, Civ started to show its age. New games were released, genres came and went. Civ was still a great game, but the new games were much sexier. Then Civilization II was released. How could they make arguably the best game ever made (at the time) better? Well, they did, and with flying colors. Civ II was everything Civ was with better graphics are more options. Instead of telling people, “You have to play Civilization,” you’d tell them, “You have to play Civilization II!”

Now that Civ III is out, there’s only one thing to say: “You have to play Civilization III.“

Note from the editor: Screenshots for detailed strategy games like Civ3 tend to be huge (in resolution and file size). We’ve resized all these images from an original setting of 1024x768 to 800x600, and lowered the quality of the jpeg compression to make the downloads bearable. If you’d like to see full-quality, full-sized shots for Civ3, please check out our Gallery page.

Civilization I (For Windows)

Civilization II

Alpha Centauri

The Brief

For the poor souls out there who have never played any of the Civilization games, I’ll describe the experience as briefly as possible: You are the supreme leader of a historical civilization, i.e. Cleopatra of the Egyptians. You start with a small group of people under your control, willing to build a city to start your empire. You can build more cities and improve them with civic buildings like Libraries and Churches. You can also build military units to fight other civilizations. As time passes you learn new technologies, from written language all the way up to genetics. To win the game you need to dominate the map through political or military power. You can alternatively build a spaceship and send it to Alpha Centauri for colonization.

Sounds simple, but Civilization is everything but. We’ll get into the gory details in a bit, let’s talk about the aesthetics first.

Gotta love the logo

So it begins

Cityscape with Apollo Program