Quickie: Civilization - Beyond Earth
Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 5:16 am
As ever, the trailer for a Sid Meier game managed to stir something really powerful in me. The unnamed narrator's story, as succinctly told as it is, eludes to so much bravery and so much sacrifice I felt myself tearing up a bit. It's pretty rare that a game's trailer alone makes me smile and actually root for characters that I know aren't much more than window-dressing for the plot - especially in the case of a 4X game, where there's not going to be any definable characters to speak of for the most part.
I also thought the guys behind the cinematic were fairly thoughtful. See, the game splits the world's civilizations across six future colonist corporations, and the Near East's vested interests are joined in with the Indian Protectorate. Based on the headgear the civilians are sporting, we're somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and soldiers from the Indian Protectorate are loading candidates into ships that are all destined to leave the planet.
With today's ethnic, political and religious tensions, focusing on one of the greater regions we're being brought up to consider as being fairly shady reminds us that there's Pakistani geneticists or urban planners out there, or Afghan doctors, priests or imams. People that deserve a shot at hope and prosperity as much as we do. People that deserve peace, or at least a new lease on life.
All I could think of was "Godspeed, kiddo. By the way, your hijab's pretty."
I absolutely did not leak at all. Nope. Those were invisible ninjas cutting invisible onions underneath my eyes.
I also thought the guys behind the cinematic were fairly thoughtful. See, the game splits the world's civilizations across six future colonist corporations, and the Near East's vested interests are joined in with the Indian Protectorate. Based on the headgear the civilians are sporting, we're somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and soldiers from the Indian Protectorate are loading candidates into ships that are all destined to leave the planet.
With today's ethnic, political and religious tensions, focusing on one of the greater regions we're being brought up to consider as being fairly shady reminds us that there's Pakistani geneticists or urban planners out there, or Afghan doctors, priests or imams. People that deserve a shot at hope and prosperity as much as we do. People that deserve peace, or at least a new lease on life.
All I could think of was "Godspeed, kiddo. By the way, your hijab's pretty."
I absolutely did not leak at all. Nope. Those were invisible ninjas cutting invisible onions underneath my eyes.