I've played many hours of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It's an interesting take on Civilization, colonizing a mysterious planet full of xenofungus that, by all accounts, seems to be rather hostile to your being there, and yet being able to build a civilization anyway. The diplomacy system is more advanced than that of Civ1 and Civ2, too, which is a nice touch. Your territory's borders are clearly marked on the map and must be respected. That said, the game has a few flaws that stop it being a 5-star game in my opinion. The "music" is utterly appalling. The least bad music is the Gaian music which is very boring indeed, and everything else doesn't really count as music at all, but more of a cacophony of sudden noises and irritating discordant tones that assault the ears. They should've hired someone competent to do a decent music track. This is unfortunate, as the best way to play the game is probably with the music off. The game seems rather unbalanced, too; the human hive will usually spam tons of colonies and kick ass, whereas the Morganites will build 4 or 5 colonies and promptly get destroyed by someone else. It all feels a little unfinished. Also, and this is a small bugbear of mine, the latest patch of the game corrupts the minimap in the bottom-right corner, making the colony "dots" corrupted and out of shape. This is an introduced bug because an earlier version that I had did not have this problem. Overall, still a very good strategy game. But a shame about the flaws.
This is a very good idea for a strategy game, and atmospherically it works well - the music is great and one is easily able to get into the game. However, for a game that really requires you to notice fine details of various scenes, I find the graphical choice of basically rendering everything with monochrome graphics to be... odd, to say the least. I found myself really squinting a lot of the time and not being able to make out what was going on in various scenes because the graphics were just so grainy and unclear. Maybe this was intentional, making it harder to figure stuff out, but I think it would've been better if they'd just had clear, multi-colour graphics frankly.
