Compared with Sam, my tastes in computer gaming are fairly tame. I’m an occasional player at best, and get bored fairly quickly. And I don’t really have lots of time for it, as you can probably imagine.

But I do quite like the classic Civilisation (surely one of the worst time-suckers ever invented, although people now seem to give EverCrack that title) so I was quite pleased when I discovered that there is now a MacOSX version of the (obviously free) FreeCiv. It’s a little complicated to obtain (you need to get it through Fink), and when you do get it installed you need to start and configure a FreeCiv server before cranking up the FreeCiv client. But once you are there it’s very very polished and fun. And just as anti-social as always.

The only other game I play on a irregular basis is Myth II: Soulblighter, now almost five years old. It was made by the same company that later wound up making Halo for the XBox. Myth is a classic of tactical realtime gaming, with lots of solo levels and a fanatical multiplayer community. So fanatical that the fans themselves recently updated the game so that it now plays happily on MacOSX (and WinXP for that matter) and takes advantage of the new video cards that weren’t even dreamed of when the game was first released. It looks fantastic, plays very well, and is more than enough excitement for me.

The fact that I find a five year old game the height of excitement shows that I’m just not a gamer.