Aside from MMOs, I really enjoy playing the Civilization series of games, notably Civ 4 at the moment. While looking for a mod pack, I ran across this news piece over at Gamespot. At first glance I thought it was basically Civ 5, but after reading a bit it seems to be a Civ 4 port to consoles, and a very watered down port at that.

They changed up the graphics to a greatly exaggerated cartoon style, remove the ‘tough, less fun’ concepts such as pollution, corruption etc, and made it more about the “action”. News flash, the Civ series is not an action series. Watching grass grow has more action than a turn in Civ. Story at 11, fans of Civ don’t want more ‘action’. All those ‘tough’ concepts that are in the game currently are what separates Civ from the rest of the pack and gives it such incredible replay value. Why else would there be so many mods out that add and expand those concepts?

While I’m a VERY casual console fan, I still don’t understand why developers continue to dumb down ports. With the success of the Wii, and its target market of younger players (although I would argue the target is ‘casual’ players, not an age group) it will be interesting to see how Sony and Microsoft change course and attempt to hit that demographic. My guess is we will be seeing a lot more cartoons shortly.