Then there are the cult books, that spring up out of nowhere but gain a huge and loyal following, like Jack Kerouac's On The Road. The majority of computer games fall into the Jackie Collins/Harold Robbins class of book: trashy, formulaic, but very popular. Do what? Draw an analogy between computer games and novels, that's what. I know that at least one literary snob is going to write in and chastise me for doing so, but I'm going to do it anyway. Oh and if you are one of those people who haven't seen the original Civilisation, it's worth knowing that this is a 'turn-based' game, but it does somehow feel like a 'realtime' game. Get the drift? And there there five difficulty levels (from 'bloody hard' to 'forget about it'), an option for creating random maps and another to make your own. (Which might not go down too well back home. (3) But you've a hidden agenda: once you have established yourself, it might be quite nice instead to cut all bonds with your mother country. (2) Your orders are simple: conquer the New Lands for your mother country in any way you see fit. You start off with a tiny, crappy ship and a budget of 1000 gold pieces. the French, the Dutch or the Spanish (there are subtle differences).

(1) You play the part of either the English. But before the storyboard, just very quickly, here are the main directives of the game. You'll get a bit of information and at the same time a bit of atmosphere (hopefully). what I've done, to avoid boring everyone to death with annotations and graphs, is to devote most of the space on these three pages to a storyboard. (b) If you're not familiar with Civilisation you may be thinking I should have done loads of annotated screen shots to explain what all the icons were for - but it would have made for pretty boring reading, and at the end of the day you still wouldn't have got the 'flavour' of the game.

All you really need to know is that if you loved Civilisation, you'll love Colonization at least equally as much. although deeper and more complex and with a few extra bits, is still much the same as it was in Civilisation. (a) If you're familiar with Civilisation then you'll already know roughly what to expect here: the game structure in Colonization. This is going to be the shortest, least in-depth review of one of the most complex strategy games around - but I'm keeping things brief and concise for a reason.

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