[Antonin]

For me, a game should be highly detailed and immersive. It should draw me in and make me care about what is happening in the game. If a game is immersive I think about it when I'm not playing. I plan strategy and worry about what the opponents are going to do next.

A perfect game, for me, should also be open-ended. If it's not a sandbox type of game, it should at most just give me a general goal or set of victory conditions. I don't like games with "missions" or a bunch of scripted or triggered events.

SE4 meets most of my criteria for an ideal game.

Other games I like include Patrician 2, Railroad Tycoon 2, Civ3, Tropico, Capitalism 2, Chariots of War, Pharoh/Cleopatra, Caesar 3 and Europa Universalis 2. I love managing resources, buying and selling, etc.

Another is Cutthroats, a game that puts you in the role of a pirate captain. You hire your crew and provision them and roam the Caribbean in search of ships to capture and loot.

I also like Alpha Centauri.

OOTP Baseball 5 and Title Bout Championship Boxing are more of my favorites. I love games that let me manage personnel.

I also play Steel Panthers World at War. It has lots of scenarios, but you can also just generate a battle and play it out. You can also rename your unit commanders, which is cool.

I really enjoyed SimCity 3000, but it crashed every few minutes on my machine so I deleted it.

It's not that I don't enjoy action games. I played Doom 2 for a long time, and I still play Quake. I also very much enjoy MechWarrior 3--in skirmish mode. But I'm just not interested in games that do the same thing as Quake or MW3 or the Command and Conquer games only with bigger explosions and more blood. So what? I have Grand Theft Auto 2--why do I need GT3 or 4 or 17? I like the top-down view much more than the 1st person view anyway.

I have a 6-year-old computer and have therefore been unable to enjoy any newer games. But from the reviews I read I don't think I'm missing much. These days the trend is toward more sophisticated graphics and prettier pictures. Bigger explosions, etc. That disappoints me because I buy and play games for the gameply. A game described in an article as the "best-looking game of the year" is of no interest to me. A review that takes up a lot of space talking about how great a game looks is a clue to me that it's probably short on the gameplay elements that I would find attractive.

I read a review of the relatively new city building game Children of the Nile that talked about how beautiful the game was to look at, but at the same time a step back in gameplay from Pharoh/Cleopatra. I just laughed. If the game looks better than Pharoh/Cleopatra but does not give me more options to manage my city and population, more resources to produce, more diplomatic options, etc, what's the point????

I'm 48 years old, and in the last 3-4 years I've begun to believe the computer game industry has passed me by. It's all flash and big booms, military shooters, sci-fi shooters, crash and burn racing games, etc etc etc. Games for people who rent "the hottest games" from a store and play them for a day or two, "beat" them and then hand them back in.

I've not bothered to replace my old computer partly for financial reasons, but also because there hasn't been any point. The sole online game I play, Asheron's Call, is getting a graphics update that will not allow me to continue playing. I wonder if I will ever bother to get a new computer, just to play one single online game filled with foul-mouthed d00d types half my age.

I've longed for a political type computer game, a kind of Sim Dictator where you can pick and fire your cabinet ministers, military officials, party officials etc etc etc, set your nation's policies and budget and struggle for power in a chaotic environment resembling that of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. "Enemy of the People" it would be called. Years ago I began developing a solitaire board game based on this idea.

But nobody will ever develop a computer game of this sort. The entire market appears to be oriented toward the young, short-attention-span crowd. Look at any gaming magazine.

Who's developing complex, satisfying computer games for grownups like me?