Is it me, or is Civ 5 easier ? Roll on the DLC content...

What a sinister moment when C3P0 took a wrong turn in cloud city. The very idea of a blundering over-polite robot is funnier than any other sci-fi idea and yet you can't help feeling sorry for him.

I tried to install Civilization IV on my Windows 7 PC and it got severely messed up, so I had to roll it back to a prior restore point. Has anyone else had the same issue and if so, managed to get around it ?

Have the updates fixed this game yet ? I gave up trying to play it when it kept crashing, despite having a hi-spec PC.

What is the tower defence genre ? I can't think what other games this refers to. We could have done with some references. Looking at the screenshots, it looks a bit like the old isometric turn based strategy games. This review doesn't contain enough detail to make me want to buy the game and yet it does sound like a lot of fun. I am all for simpler games with basic playability and a good puzzle or strategy element. However, I can't help feeling that a review of nine out of ten for a game with reportedly weak graphics must be really excellent in other areas to get such a high rating.

Regarding the comment,

"Once you are a dreadnought, you are always a dreadnought."

I think the fact that you can normally die and be reincarnated in an MMO answers this question.

This has the potential to be a lot of fun. I can't think of another game that sounds quite like this and probably an MMO with guns is better than one that is primarily melee based because there won't be so much confusion with mobs of players attacking each other at close quarters. It should encourage more tactics using the terrain to give an advantage in combat.

Regarding the similarities with the original Warhammer games, there seems to be a misconception that WAR is solely based on the Warhammer tabletop games because this is what people associate with Games Workshop's high street stores. In fact, much of the game lore was delveloped from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the traditional Dungeons & Dragons style rpg which was contained in a great big book about 4cm thick. It was played in the minds of the gamers with only pre-printed character sheets and multi-sided dice as props. In Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, there were an array of skills and careers. For example, you could play the part of a grave robber with skills like climbing walls, jumping and hiding that provided a percentage advantage in carrying out these feats. Some of these careers were distinctly unheroic, like the political agitators and mule skinners, roles that are only for the NPCs in WAR, and yet it was possible to flesh out such characters and make fantastic adventure stories based on them. There was however a need for a person with the ability to implement the rules and know the game lore who wasn't usually an active player. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had a horror theme that seemed to owe something to the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and was distinctly European in flavour, presenting the game world as a sort of alternative seventeenth century Europe, quite different to Dungeons & Dragons. While WAR holds true to much of the game lore of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Warhammer the tabletop game, for those who remember the original Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game, the modern phenomenon of MMO games fails to capture the imagination in the same way and the fact that everyone is trying to exploit the game mechanics makes it seem an incredibly rushed experience where even on the pure roleplaying servers, there is little evidence of actual role playing going on where people only say things 'in character'.