The Column
by Hannibal

Welcome to a new installment of Hannibal’s column! This time, I’m going to tell you about the problems that Spanish civilization fans are facing with Infogrames and the Spanish Civilization III/PTW versions.
 
    First, I want to say that I understand how difficult is to survive in such a dangerous market like videogames’ one. The companies face a rising piracy and the games are increasing their multimedia contents, so every game is now much more expensive than any of the ancient classics. I also understand how difficult is for a distribution company to make money in “small” (at least, smaller than US, UK and Germany's) markets like Spain or Italy, even more when piracy is bigger in this countries than in other countries
 
    But this is not a valid excuse for some things that I feel Infogrames Iberica is doing in a wrong way:
  • The last patch published for the Spanish version of Civilization III was the version 1.21f.
  • Spanish PTW won't appear until January (after Christmas campaign – what a non-sense!), and they are going to sell the 1.04f PTW version, not the latest (v1.14f today).
  • Spanish patches are not published in a web (I can’t find the Infogrames Iberica web – I wonder if it really exists): you need to send them a letter in order to get the patch – via ordinary mail! Fortunately, somebody sent the patch to Apolyton, so now you can download it from here.
  • It seems that with Spanish PTW you won't be able to play against people with non Spanish PTW version (It’s a non confirmed information - I hope it won't be true…) .
 
    Some of the Spanish Civ3 fans have signed a protest, as you can read on the Spanish forum or on the news page at Apolyton and Civfanatics. There is still time enough to Infogrames Iberica to correct their faults, and I hope they'll do their best. The Spanish videogames market hasn't improved from Civ2’s time: the Civ2 distributor on Spain (Proein) only published Civ2: "Conflicts in Civilization" expansion pack, but not Civ2: "Fantastic Worlds", Civ2: MGE or Civ2:TOT. The only difference that I see between these times and today is that Proein didn’t went against unofficial translators, but Infogrames doesn’t want them: It’s O.K. for us, Infogrames need to protect his properties, but it’s O.K. as far as they translate all patches! Spanish costumers paid the same money that English costumers, so we want the same level of service, and this include patches. If they don’t want or can’t translate the patches, at least we hope they will make the English patches compatible with the Spanish version. You can see details of the protest here.
 
    If these problems are not solved, I would recommend buying the US version via Amazon (one of this page sponsor) to all Spanish costumers with a good level on English language. Those of them that don’t understand English will be punished with the lack of patches.
 
    There is still time to prevent these problems, and I hope Infogrames will do its best.
 
    As a side note, I want to remember you that this column express my opinion, and not the site owner’s opinion.
 

Aníbal from Carthage, 22nd December 2002.
 
 
First Column Previous Column

Next Column

 Last Column