Roman Empires

Suddenly, there are two games focusing on Roman city building, namely, the 'Glory of the Roman Empire' and 'Sid Meier's CivCity: Rome'.

I have not decided if I want to get them.

The reviews on Gamespot, a poor game review site that has declined in quality for a great number of years now, were not good. Not that I was expecting them to be good anyhow, I could almost guess their ratings without playing the games! Heh.

On Gamespot, the problem with their reviews is that anything that does not match their reviewers preconceived ideas of their franchise favourites tend to get shot down. Hence, one finds their large favourite franchises like Warcraft, Civilization and a few others consistently getting the same favourable reviews while other games get reviews like 'same tired gameplay' and so forth. With reviewers coming up with lines like these:

"If you are expecting some kind of Wing Commander: Privateer-style story with plenty of structure, you won't find it here."

These reviewers can't accept differences in execution and ideas.

A hardcore gaming friend has even suspected that these reviews from Gamespot and their irk often pander to the big game companies for a variety of reasons which I think is fairly obvious.

Recently, there was that incident with www.1up.com where they pulled a review. They covered up with a series of unconvincing explanations but it was clear that someone sold out...