Sid Meier's Civilization for Super Nintendo UI improvement and Text cleaning ROM Information: Database match: Sid Meier's Civilization (USA) Database: No-Intro: Super Nintendo Entertainment System (v. 20210222-050638) File/ROM SHA-1: 07ACBF40D10AF153E19630C0F62BC74ADCB84A86 File/ROM CRC32: 41FDBA82 You can patch with Lunar IPS or another IPS patcher of your liking. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [About Sid Meier's Civilization] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ah, Civilization... A game with a gigantic scope. You can win by destroying your opponets. You can win by being the most advanced of all, and never going to battle with other nations. So many technological routes to take, so many ways to play... ...And all of them will have you waste centuries slowly making roads! Or well, you could appear right besides a bandit camp and get completely destroyed before you even begin. It's Sid Meier's Civilization, after all. While Civilization is mostly seen as a classic PC strategy game, it also got a Super Nintendo version developed and released in 1994, three years after the original 1991 DOS release, although as of today not many people even remember it existing. And it wasn't just a hastily made thing to get rushed out of the door! MicroProse, the studio co-founded by Sid Meier, couldn't have chosen a better partner to make this version for a console, that being Koei, a company that lived by and for Strategy games, most well known being their Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Nobunaga's Ambition series, but they also made things like Gemfire, Genghis Kan, Aerobiz Supersonic, and quite a lot more. They're also the people behind the Uncharted Waters games! They worked with Asmik to make Civilization for the Super Nintendo, and it is a fantastic version of the game, far better than I would have expected to turn. In fact I'd say I like it more than the original release, even if some things like the Civlopedia is missing, although still you can get a lot of information in each menu. Terrains are much easier to differenciate, visuals in general are better if you ask me, even water is animated for some reason and it also has a pretty neat soundtrack (the city menus are pretty catchy). The overall user interface is nicely done and the implementation of the SNES pad is also very successful, as you can quickly swap between menus through the use of some "hotkey-like" button combinations, quickly scroll through lists by using L and R, you can assign movement on an unit by simply pushing Y, letting you skip the main menu and cut down A LOT of time of a playthrough, the cursor goes to "End of Turn" automatically once you're done with your units (again, cutting time) and it seems like, unlike the DOS release, playing on Earth doesn't limit which Civilization you can play as. Oh, and it's also SNES Mouse-compatible, although the simulated Mouse with the D-Pad on the SNES controller is also really well made. It moves in "tiles", so while your first reaction might think it's very "choppy", it really is a great idea. This way, the cursor will always be well positioned in each square of the map, or land correctly in any interactive menu element. ...And it has no DRM, that's quite nice too! Saving is also very quick, even if creating a world takes a few long seconds. You could save right after creating a world, which the DOS version if I remember right didn't let you until you had one city. There were a few changes on the easier difficulties, like always starting with two Settlers (keep always one of those, because they don't belong to any city, you basically have a free "constructor" Unit that requires no maintenance) and a bit more money. So yeah, for how a port of something like this could have ended, the planets seemingly aligned and miraculously created a very nice console version of Civilization. ...Even then, it still has some classic Civilization issues that were born in the original game, like the absolutely boring process of transforming roads into railroads, but then again, you cannot blame this conversion for it. But there were a couple of problems, which are the ones I try to address with this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- [About this Hack] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are two patches. The first one, and simplest of the two, is to fix typos and a few inconsistencies. While the text in the game is perfectly fine most of the time, it had a few silly typos here and there, and a few repeating words in the same sentence. So that's fixed. I also de-capitalized names of Units and other words that had no reason to be that way, making things a bit better to read. The other patch, the biggest one for me, is that even if I find the UI great, there was some odd choice for colors. More specifically, one that both the background elements and the font use, a white-ish tone that's used as a shadow-like effect unerneath numbers and letters. I get the idea, to make the text seem to be engraved into the stone-like UI. Cool idea, and if you were playing on a CRT I imagine the effect is less pronounced thanks to well, CRT and AV cables (which the vast majority of people used back then) blurring things out, but playing on modern displays, either through emulation, or with these little devices such the OSSC, the pixels are much clearer, and the white actually strains my eyes after a while, and it just looks unpleasant. Not just that, the white color bled into other areas of the UI, and when your cursor was over a "clickable" part of the menu, it would turn into red, which combined with white it clashes badly. So this patch attempts to fix this and a few other things to make all the UI elements easier to the eyes. It also touches up other areas to make text comfortable to see everywhere. That's really all there is to this.