I had, shall we say, a bad experience some years ago. Several days of lying in a darkened room eating cold party leftovers were to be expected. The amount of comfort I got from playing Alpha Centauri throughout, though, was a surprise.
It's less about mere familiarity than you'd think, given how late I first played it. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri By Sid Meier endures partly because its design has aged well, but mostly because it's an unusually human 4X strategy. Its high concept story asks for interpretation, for a philosophical response. Where so many others are about the arbitrary icons of nationalism, or stock elves/insectoids/robots, it's a game about ideology and personality. Where a sequel to Civilization's "send a colony ship into space" ending could have asked "what if lasers and aliens", Alpha Centauri instead asked: Where is humanity going?
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