Haven't done THAT in a while.

So I was relaxing in my club's office this afternoon, idly surfing the net, and eventually planning to call up some friends to go hang out on a Friday night, you know? Well, that plan got changed rather swiftly. I was reading something, and it brought up Baba Yetu- the absolutely amazing opening song from Civilzation 4.

Now, when I was younger, back in high school, I was absolutely addicted to Civilization 3. My mom got it for me as a birthday gift (when I had wanted Age of Empires 2- shows how much I knew!) and I got hooked. I'd come home from school and play for hours and hours. But, I grew up and grew out of it, particularly when my mom would hide the discs and then just flat-out lose them.

So someone brought up the song, and I immediately got a massive bug to play the game. Now, I had left my copy of Civ 4 at home- I don't play much at all anymore, and my mac has some issues when it tries to run the game- so I was thinking that I wasn't going to get my fix, but I turned around and saw that the office computer had a copy ready and waiting. So I fired it up. My first game I went with the Japanese on Noble difficulty, and I was staying reasonably competitive. For some reason, Sulemain, the guy I was next to, was just blasting ahead scorewise, for reasons I could not fathom. I could see that if I was gonna win, it'd have to be a long haul, and I wasn't really up for that, so I quit and started over, knocking down the difficulty and playing the Celts. I had a very nice starting position- on the coast with some good land and resources. I explored west, and ran into Stalin. Lovely chap. He was right in the middle of my prime expansion space, so I built up 2 Chariots and 2 archers and killed him straight off. Moscow was a crazy city, in the middle of a shitton of floodplains, which meant that it'd be a population powerhouse. I planted some good core cities, and met 2 neighbors to the North. I had snagged Buddhism right off the bat, so that allowed me to get them on my good side pretty quick. I filled in a good chunk of land, then went to my usual strategy of sitting on my ass and building. I constructed several wonders in one city south of my capitol in particular, when I noticed that I was making a lot of culture. So I figured I'd use my capitol, the city to the south, and Moscow to go for a culture victory- you have to have 3 cities with 50,000 culture by the end of the game. That entailed a lot of temple-building, selective builds of Cathedrals, and spamming wonders. In the process, I got obscenely rich with good builds and wonders, and I pretty much just coasted. The entire world had a bad case of "peace"*- there was only 1 war that I know of after I wiped Stalin.

Fun times, and a weird relapse for me.

* Speaking of peace, President Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize! I'm a little skeptical, but Yay!