This is where I should be telling you all about The Movies, which should have been released on Wednesday. I was there bright and early, eager to get my copy before they sold out… and of course it was nowhere to be found. The worker-drone at E.B. knew nothing (as usual), but the helpful guy at J.B. Hi-Fi explained that they had put the game on the shelves that morning, only to have it immediately recalled because of a faulty installation disk. He explained that it would be fixed and re-issued, “in about a month. Probably in time for Christmas.”

Goddammit. So I bought Civilization 4 instead.

Now, Civ 4 is an excellent game. Let’s get that fact out of the way right now. However, it has one little problem: me. When it comes to the topic of history, I can be an excessively curmudgeonly bastard. By way of example, the other day I spent half an hour yelling at the History Channel because the narrator of ‘I, Caesar - The Life of Justinian’ kept referring to the Byzantine Empire as the ‘Eastern Roman Empire’. Let me tell you, buddy, you can only get away with that before the 5th century A.D.!

See? I’m getting all worked up again. Which brings me to the bizarre historical oddities of Civ 4.

First up, I have some problems with the range of nations you can select from. The Incans are included but not the Mayans. The Mongolians are in there but not the Koreans. The freaking Empire of Mali (Where? Exactly) is included at the expense of the once-great medieval power of Ethiopia. Arabs and Persians are present (and it’s a pretty hazy distinction between those two) but no Turks. And, glaringly, we’re missing vital historical players like the Norse, Celts, Babylonians and Carthaginians.

More mind-boggling are the leaders chosen for each country. Representing the Arabian Empire we have the general Saladin but not the prophet-warlord Mohammed, who founded an entire religion and forged his empire at scimitar-point. For leader of India we get Gandhi, which has the rather anachronistic effect of making the Indian nation pacifistic and diplomatically pleasant throughout all of history.

No Ptolemy for Egypt. No Charlemagne for Germany. Greece gets Alexander the Great, who was actually Macedonian. Rome gets Julius Caesar, when it should have got Augustus or Trajan. But the poor Aztecs get the shortest straw of all: Their national leader is Montezuma, arguably the most incompetent ruler that nation ever had.

Then there’s the treatment of religion in the game. In the interests of not offending anyone, the designers decided to allow any civilization to adopt any religion, and for all religions to be functionally identical, gameplay-wise. This leads to some serious wackiness. You get Hindhus eating cows and Jews eating pigs. You get Jewish missionaries, which have never actually existed in history. Weirdest of all, there are no economic bonuses or negatives for converting to Islam, which in reality forbids usury and requires the payment of Zakat (one fortieth of your yearly earnings go to charity).

And just think about it: Would Buddhism really be the same religion if Siddhartha Gautama had been born in feudal England? What would Egyptian Christianity look like? These are the questions that keep me up at night. In my last game Moses was born in the Aztec Empire, which led me to imagine a Mesoamerican Ten Commandments like this:

1. Thou shalt worship no other gods but Quetzalcoatl. Oh, except for Huitzilopochtli. And Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc, Xipe Totec, Coatlicue, Xochiquetzal…
2. Thou shalt not kill. Unless it’s to sacrifice a burning heart to me. Because if you don’t, I’ll pull down the sun and end your pathetic mortal existences.

And so on.

UPDATE: Good news, everyone! Turns out the rumours of The Movies’ demise were greatly exaggerated. The problem seems to have been fixed, because I now have myself a copy. Hooray!