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Test of Time claims to be a sprucing-up of Civ II, but I found it to be more of a sprucing-down. The graphics, while marginally more "realistic," are significantly less sharp than in the '96 version. The movies upon completing Wonders of the World are gone, as are the palace rewards, the city views, and the gyrating representatives during diplomatic interludes. The last two of these were themselves disappointing changes from the original Civilization, the nifty little city panoramas replaced by a totally inert pseudo-3D view and the wonderful jabbering head of Abraham Lincoln and company (with appropriate backdrop and advisors) replaced by a dull portrait with the aforementioned gyrating pseudo-3D doll. The talking heads are apparently coming back with Civ III, but are now done by Poser or some such program. Bah. What is it with the 3D fetish? Humans can still paint and draw much, much better-looking things than computers can render. I'll take pixelly art from ten years ago over today's polygon meshes any day of the week. The music has gone downhill, too. Where are the cool little themes for each civilization? They've all been replaced by muzak. Feh.
Not to say that the changes Civ II made were all bad. (Though the changes Test of Time made were all bad; I'd thought the removal of Sid Meier's name was just Hasbro's way of flipping the bird at the game's creator, but it's entirely possible he just asked not to have his name kept on an inferior product.) The isometric view Civ II introduced was an improvement, and I liked seeing the new icons for cities and units, if not for city structures. And the move away from all-or-nothing battle was a welcome one. Change isn't all progress, but neither is it all decline.
Which is part of the reason I disliked Harlan Ellison's story "Jeffty Is Five," which I finally got around to reading after having had it recommended to me by various people. One of the assumptions of the story is that pop culture has been on a precipitous downslope since the 1940s, that radio dramas were a pinnacle of entertainment but that all TV and all movies since the 50s are crap. Now, the story was apparently written in 1977, and I'm not really equipped to debate the merits of 1977 pop culture vs. that of 1947. But I can tell you that pop culture has not been in a linear decline over the course of my lifetime. 90s television was vastly superior to 80s television, which was itself an improvement over the insipid stuff I saw from earlier eras in syndication; and as far as I'm concerned, the best show of all time is still a going concern: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Good movies have been spotty of late, but 1999 was a great year for them. Music has been in decline since the mid-90s — though many great albums have come out more recently, including my favorite, Hole's Celebrity Skin, in '98 — but the early 90s represented a dramatic improvement over the late 80s; the decline has been going on for maybe five years, not fifty.
So Ellison's jeremiad rang false with me, because "stuff when I was a kid was great, stuff today sucks" just doesn't jibe with my experience. Quality goes up and down fairly regularly; long climbs or slides are pretty rare. We seem to be in a slide period in a lot of ways at the moment: in music, in commercial computer games, in politics. C'est la vie. Things'll probably pick up.
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