I have to admit that I’m a bit of a gamer. It all started back on my eighth birthday, when my parents surprised me with an Atari 2600. I didn’t even know I wanted one.

After that, I spent my summers with the following daily routine: mornings at the pool, lunchtime rest over some MTV (which had just started broadcasting), and then the afternoon indoors playing Atari with friends. My favorite games included Combat, Homerun, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Pitfall, and Pac-Man. I even had Pac-Man Fever on cassette.

By 1987 the Atari had gotten too simplistic to enjoy, and I upgraded to the Nintendo Entertainment System. I had very few games for this, but nevertheless I spent hours playing Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Excitebike, and of course, an upgraded version of Donkey Kong.

I then coasted through my teenage years without a game console, and then in college a roommate happened to have a Super Nintendo. The game then? TopGear 3000.

As a wedding present we received a turkey rotisserie, only the catch was at the time we were vegetarians. So we promptly traded that appliance in for a Sony PlayStation. The games we played? We enjoyed N20, MLB 2000, The Phantom Menace, and some snowboarding game whose name escapes me.

I recently upgraded to a Sony PlayStation 2 now that the console and games are pretty cheap, given that the PlayStation 3 is due out soon. I’m so late to the game here that almost every game I own is from the Greatest Hits collection. For me this has mostly become the Sims 2 machine, since my PC is too slow to support that game.

Which brings me to PC games. We bought our Gateway back when the company was trying to get the Gateway stores off the ground, and of course we bought the gaming pack. It was here I found that I really liked strategy and simulation games. We suddenly had Small Soldiers Squad Commander and The Neverhood, both of which I promptly completed. I then moved onto The Sims, eventually buying all the expansion packs.

But of all these, the game that has taken up most of my free time is Galactic Civilizations. I came across it a couple of years ago when the Austin American-Statesman recommended it as a versatile strategy game. The review reminded me of a Mac game I played in college called Galactic Frontiers, so I decided to give it a try.

Now I know the space strategy purists out there claim that Masters of Orion is the better game and that GalCiv is a rip-off of that, but I don’t care. For me this game has all the elements I like: it’s simple to learn, can be customized for level of ability and duration of game, and it requires that I actually think about what I’m doing.

I have recently upgraded to Galactic Civilizations 2: Dread Lords, but have only played it a couple of times and don’t quite have the hang of it yet. I think it’s a better game than the original, as it has more customization opportunities and some additional complexities that make it more unpredictable.

So what does all of this have to do with this year’s ACL Fest? Nothing really, other than the name of this week’s pick.

This week’s pick: Galactic

We first saw Galactic at the 2003 ACL Fest. We were standing very far back from the stage, but what I immediately noticed was the power and intensity of the music. A lot of this has to do with the talent of the rhythm section, which consists of bassist Robert Mercurio, keys master Richard Vogel, and drummer Stanton Moore.

Like Soulive, Galactic is one of the frontrunners in the move to bring jazz-funk back into the mainstream, and you can count on this to be a powerful show.

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To see the complete ACL Festival line-up, click here.

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