Civilization IV

The best educational video game ever created just got better...


True/False Comprehension Questions:
1. The main idea is that Civilization IV will continue to use the PC as its main platform.
2. XBox and PS3 are console games, not PC games.
3. The speaker is probably one of the creators of the game.
4. It was impossible to adapt the game to buttons and joysticks. It has to be played on a computer.
5. The word multi-player probably means to play against the computer instead of real people.

Click below to read the transcript and check your answers.

Double click on any word to see the meaning.



Sound running -- when you're ready...
Right now we're working on Civilization Revolution, bringing Civilization to the consoles, the PS3s, the XBOX 360, and the DS. It's really a brand new redesign of Civilization trying to really take advantage of the best features of the console with incredible graphics, connectivity with XBox Live, etc. And really some kind of fun game play, bring the leaders to life with really cool animations, cool combat that you can actually interact with, a tech tree, all the kind of one mark (?) turn stuff that makes "Civ" so fun to play, but kind of brought to life in a new fresh way. I think it'll introduce a lot of new people to the Civilization game play, really I think bring strategy gaming to the fore in console gaming.

It'll also be fun for our long-term "Civ" players -- kind of a new approach to it: we've got the game of the week which is a way you can kind of compare your best scores with everybody else in the world. I think our hard core Civ players will want to be on that leader board. We've got multi-player game play, single player game play, very unique civilizations to play each one with our own special powers, so it's a really fun game.

We had to really take a look at a couple of things before we brought Civ to the console, you know, could it be played on the console controller? Civ players are used to keyboard and mouse, but we found that the things that you do in a typical Civ turn map very well to the buttons and the joysticks on the controller. Since it is turn-based, you can play at your own pace so there is no trying to rush around the map clicking here or there or whatever so that worked very well. I think playing on a TV screen really allowed us to bring the camera in and kind of really show you in detail the buildings, the units, the world that you are playing in which actually turned out to be a positive and with XBox Live some of the kind of built in online features we were really able to make multiplayer a fundamental part of the game so we were really able to take advantage of some of the special features that are available on console.

Online multi-player, there'll be rankings, you can work your way up the various rankings. We will have free-for-all games where all players are playing games for themselves. You can have team games, two versus two. There will be rankings at different difficulty levels. There will be rankings for achieving different types of difficulty. There are a ton of achievements in the game that you can win by, you know, simple ones for starting the game but also win on the deity level things like that, really hard core achievements for the serious players to aim for. So there is really a lot of kind of cool online achievement type content for Civ players.

We really want to let people know we are not abandoning the PC platform in fact we just brought out "Beyond the Sword" expansion for Civ and we'll continue to do PC games but I think right now there is kind of a convergence happening with technology that really allows to do games for both the console and the PC.

Civ revolution will be coming out this summer for the PS3, the XBox 360, and the DS and we hope you like it.

ANSWERS:
1. The main idea is that Civilization IV will continue to use the PC as its main platform.
FALSE: They are going to continue making games for the PC but the main point is that Civ IV is now available on consoles.
2. XBox and PS3 are console games, not PC games.
TRUE: Console games are TV games.
3. The speaker is probably one of the creators of the game.
TRUE: Sid Meier is the creator of the game.
4. It was impossible to adapt the game to buttons and joysticks. It has to be played on a computer.
FALSE: "..but we found that the things that you do in a Civ turn map well to the buttons and the joysticks on the controller."
5. The word multi-player probably means to play against the computer instead of real people.
FALSE: Multi means more than one so multi-player means playing with other people, not against the computer.