Civilization "light"

[Forward Observer]

My xbox version has a few problems. The game slows and chugs along during the later phases if the camera is required to move quickly from one side of the map to the other, as is often the case when scrolling between the cities of a large empire.

The engine wheezes if one advisor/AI character quickly comes up on screen to replace another. That was possibly my own fault for hammering the B button to get rid of them as quickly as possible, and so forcing the game to display the characters while it was still loading the resources for them.

In a few battles the men which make up the two battling units stumbled around and refused to fight for a long time. That meant the game was trapped in the battle. The worst example lasted for around a minute; the men started to attack each other as I got up to reset the console.

That's one I haven't heard before. I have one of the original, backward compatible PAL models and it's rare that I hear the fans kick in to give it more cooling than it gets while idling. As a general observation, it's DVD playback rather than gaming which places more stress on my PS3.

I've also experienced most of what you describe at some point. The game obviously is not optimized for either console, and it may just be one of the examples why true RTS's are simply more suited for the PC.

As far as the statement about the 60GB system versus the other models, I read it in an on-line review of the 40GB model after the discontinuance of the 60 GB model was announced. I still have quite a few PS 2 games I play occasionally, and that was my logic for getting the 60GB model. The only place I could locate one by the time I decided to buy was in used condition on EBay. The few new ones that were listed were and still are selling for over $600. I ended up buying a used model for $450.

My logic turned out to be both faulty---and costly when you consider that I still have a perfectly good PS 2 that I couldn't sell for the extra I spent just to get a 60GB model PS 3. On top of that, the used PS 3 I bought only lasted about 6 weeks before the graphics card in it fried. Since it was not under warranty, I had to send it off to the Sony service center for repairs. They charged me a flat fee of $160 including shipping for this.

The service was quick and actually instead of repairing it, they just sent me what appeared to be a brand new 60GB model since it still had the plastic film coating on all the shiny surfaces. However, it was listed a refurbished, so I only got a 90 day warranty.

As a result of my misguided purchase, I ended up spending $610 when I could have simply bought a 40GB model at Amazon for $400 and gotten a free game or Blu-ray movie to boot.

I usually try to make smart, well researched purchases, but this certainly was not one of them---LOL!