The 2025 Desert Island Video Game Draft

[Mr. S£im Citrus]

Sid Meier's Civilization IV - PC - 2005

Picking up a classic here. Civilization IV was the ultimate version of the series for me personally. I played this so much that it became hard for me to play the sequels, so I don't know if later iterations have improved things beyond the presentation.

The things from this version that stood out to me:

• Diplomacy mechanics were more visible, and religion was added as essentially a viral force that affected relationships in diplomacy and civ happiness and almost nothing else. (The attempt to not make any value statements about any particular religion was in itself a value statement about religion in general).
• Strategic resources (e.g. Oil) were revealed in later eras (after civilizations were mostly already set up.) resulting in shaking up the world's stability

I think lots of the ways Civilization games represent human history that are a bit silly in how abstract they are, but it is interesting to think about them as reflections of the time in which they were made.

Would have been my Number One overall pick, had I participated. I still play this game almost daily.

 

[Turgenev]

Kingdom Rush. Android.



Tower defence game. I'll come back and wrie something more later.

 

[Warhawk]

I haven't ever played the Civ games, but I've been tempted to try them out once or twice. Maybe there's no time like the present...

Same here.

 

[Sluggah]

Title: Team Fortress 2
Format: PC
Year of Release: 2007
Developer: Valve

The game closest to my heart, TF2 is a multiplayer first-person shooter and the sequel to a mod of an already picked game (Quake) which was later packaged with another already picked game (Half-Life)…hence some of my pre-draft hand-wringing about the rules.

Building on the team-based gameplay of the original (capture the flag, control point), they added new game modes, an amazing aesthetic, humor, and injected tons of personality into the 9 player classes.

18 years after release, it continues to receive official Valve server support, and I’d still be on them if I wasn’t already sitting at a desk staring at a computer all day.

Pre-twitch and the legitimacy of esports, and for my own nostalgia, here’s some dudes casting a league match where my team rolled another a million years ago: