Note: To see the screenshots properly you have to enlarge the whole page. Free WordPress doesn’t allow enlarging images separately, unfortunately.
During this summer I only had the access to my laptop for most of the time. Unfortunately, it’s too much of a toaster to play any serious games for too long, so instead, I played some of my guilty pleasure games from the days bygone. Since the guilty pleasure I picked for my summer activity were old city building games, I decided to take some nice screenshots and write a couple of blog posts about these games.
So, to start this off, I played Zeus: Master of Olympus with the expansion Poseidon: Master of Atlantis. This game is a part of the city building series with the aesthetic focus being on different ancient cultures. The games were made by Impression Games and published by Sierra Entertainment. Here is the full list of the series:
Caesar (1992), Caesar II (1995), Caesar III (1998), Pharaoh (1999), Zeus: Master of Olympus (2000), Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (2002)
Out of these six games, I played four starting from the third Caesar. And this summer I played the three non-Caesar games. Also, as you can see I jumped straight to Zeus in this blog post because it’s the game I spend the most time in. But I will also write about Pharaoh and Emperor. And why haven’t I played Caesar? The short answer is because it sucks. The first two games I just disregard, as earlier iterations of the third Caesar, and even then, once you played later games in the series, going back to Caesar is hard. Or maybe I’m just being salty because I tried playing Caesar back when I was a kid and it was hard for me to grasp at that game. But it doesn’t matter because Caesar 3 has no roadblocks (something vital for the gameplay). No roadblocks = no fun, in my opinion.
Zeus/Poseidon
I guess I should start by explaining the general premise of any game of this series. You are building a city (shocker!). There is not much more to it. You create buildings to feed your population’s needs to achieve certain milestones, like population or production or conquest. The mechanics in the games mostly stay the same, but the aesthetics change dramatically. The series tries to reflect and educate about the social and cultural structures of the historical societies (not sure how accurately, but they certainly try).
I love Zeus for its aesthetics. When I was a kid, there was a book in our house that contained the Greek myths, the Odyssey and the Troy Epic. That book sustained a lot of traffic mainly from me. Zeus was also the first game to take the mechanics of the religion to a new level by making the deities into actual game world assets with personalities and a character. I do prefer this rather than having the gods as an obscure phenomenon that just requires you to keep it pleased through a menu screen while not actually being part of your city.
And I hate how Zeus took a dramatic plummet down in the amount of mechanics that were present in Pharaoh and got simplified in Zeus. Emperor somewhat fixed the situation, but I sincerely wonder what made the developer to cut so many functional mechanics. There might have been a lot of them, okay, but the simplifying was way too overboard. I will demonstrate this in detail when I get to my Pharaoh blog post.
The artist really captured Aphroditie’s boobs in this model, lol =D The model itself is a good reason to build this temple. No wonder the population’s happiness increases with this temple. Who wouldn’t like to have such a statue in their neighborhood? I mean, OH MY GOD, look at those bazongas…
Another thing I appreciate about Zeus is the expansion Poseidon which tries to tackle the story of Atlantis. For that matter, one must also point out that Zeus campaign fuses together the history and the myths in an elegant way. And it is even more impressive with the Poseidon expansion, a story that is but fiction, yet what a well-done fiction it is in the campaign! We get a consistent story of the founding of the legendary city and the kingdom, the stories of their conquest and exploration into both west and east of Atlantic ocean, and the eventual destruction.
I got to build several beautiful cities, but unfortunately, going back to a 15 year old game wasn’t an all smooth ride, because there is a bug in both GoG and Steam version that makes animations of gods glitch, which results in them taking an unreasonable amount of time to spawn/despawn, to attack, to bless. This didn’t stop me from playing but this could be a deal breaker if you haven’t played the game before. In the end, it turned out that the last campaign, where the Greeks blast Atlantis’ into the ocean whence it came, was unplayable. The fisheries that were the main source of food for the city suffered the same animation glitch as the gods. I really wanted to play that one… =(
Hope you enjoy the screenshots! I think I have most of the gods captured in the pictures.
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