Note: To see the screenshots properly you have to enlarge the whole page. Free WordPress doesn’t allow enlarging images separately, unfortunate

Next stop on our journey through time is Pharaoh from 1999. In this game, you become the administrator of various cities in ancient Egypt. This is the 4th game in the series made by Impression Games and published by Sierra Entertainment. This game also has an expansion called Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile that brought in some interesting monument projects to the game.

Here is the main activity of the game:

Build houses to get the population -> employ the population to create the food, goods, and services -> the houses get bigger (thus increasing the population) and give more tax income as they get the access to the food, goods, and services

All of the games in the series are based on this loop. Hell, most of any builder games are based on this loop.

So what makes Pharaoh unique? The signature of this game, the way I see it, is the monument projects. These beasts take a tremendous time to create. The pyramids in my screenshots were built for so long that I finished shaping my city to the form I wanted and I STILL had to speed up the game and wait for around 30 more years for construction to be done. Actually, I started the medium pyramid in the middle of the playthrough and it got finished faster than the big pyramid… So, where is the fun? Surely not in watching this snail race? I find that the pleasure is hidden in building your city around these giants. That way, once the great projects are finished, you have a prosperous city at their feet for that perfect screenshot. Trust me, the satisfaction payoff is huge.

Another thing that I enjoyed while playing Pharaoh, were the festivals dedicated to the gods. The Caesar didn’t have a visual feedback for these activities, as far as know, while later games after Pharaoh changed their approach to religion. There is a sense of accomplishment in watching the festival square flooded with entertainers, priests, and scribes when you know that your first festival only had a couple of priests and a juggler. It’s a great way to show the player the progress and the growth of their city, as every new temple, stage, school, and a noble house sends a person to the festival.

While I love Zeus for its aesthetics, the main reason I love Pharaoh is the mechanics. The mechanics that got kinda butchered in Zeus. The center of all these management games is to keep increasing the population while fulfilling their needs. And the complexity of this task is far more superior in the Egyptian edition then it is in the Greek edition. Here is a graph I made to show the amount of mechanics in two games:

I guess no elaborate explanation needed. The number of features that were involved in the housing mechanics was dramatically cut. I wonder what happened there? While looking into this, I got curious to see as to how many requirements the houses in Ceasar have had. Imagine my shock when I saw this:

Turns out that Caesar was even more complicated than Pharaoh, even if it was just by one service. And in Caesar, you can’t control the flow of your walkers because there are no roadblocks! It must have been a pain to achieve the highest house level.  Pharaoh considers a similar feat to be an achievement. Anyway, I’m not going back to Caesar, that’s for sure…

Hope you enjoy screenshots!

Emperor

Zeus

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.

Pharaoh/Cleopatra

Emperor