Sectorgame

Ok, I've been playing this game for about a week now, it's a resource management/building game, sort of like 'Sim-City Egypt'.

I played the first version of this game, called Pharoh, about 4 years ago and found it to be great fun, so I was quite looking forward to this game.

On the plus side, the game does have nice graphics....
However, it's these grpahics that are my main complaint. On the original 3D Isometric version, you could have enormous sprawling cities which covered the entire map, with entire areas devoted to Pottery making or Farmers etc. The newer game starts to stutter and complain as soon as the game reaches about 100 farmers or you have building work going on more than one or two pyramids at a time. The cause of the problem is those graphics.

The game itself is actually less internally complex than the original, in which you could irrigate land, grow orchards etc, in return for this you get to zoom into street level and watch low-poly people wobble up and down the street.

My conclusion is this game would have been so so much better had they decided to do a sequel to the game engine instead of the graphics engine. It's pretty, but it has no depth, the Whole Egyptian and Pyramid thnig is almot like a side-line to the game, whereas it was the focus in the original.

Well, it was inevitable really.......

Everything has to be 3D these days. Even games that have no disernable benifit from it.

Personally I miss left-right and top down shooters.

I suppose it winds me up sometimes, I know gaming has evolved, but it seems to me that the edict reads 'If you can't stimulate the mind, stimulate the eyes'.

[Oldgit mode]

Thing is, I started playing games on my computer when the programmers had 1.2 Hz Processors, 4-16 colours (8 Flashing usually) and less than one tenth of a Floppy Disc of onboard memory, before Operating System and Video Memory was taken.

Role Playing Games have been fun since the Dragons could be made using teletext symbols and your greatest fear was an invisible maze. Games like Mercenary and Cholo were using the first person long before Wolfentstein and Doom came along to Amaze us. Cholo, in fact was an incredibly original and interesting game, which fitted an entire wireframe city inside 48Kb. Mercenary squeezed an entire, if incredibly dull, world into 128Kb.

What, gameplay wise, is the difference between pressing the move arrow and crouching to avoid being seen whether you are doing it in a 3D-Shadowed, hi-res environment or a nice looking, but not resource swallowing 2D one?

Even the First person shooters surrender variety for candy. Doom 2 had rooms full of Imps, backed up by a couple of Mancubi, and they didn't need to take turns to appear in order to save processor time.

Cholo involved controlling, at first, a single Hackerbot and, looking through it's eyes, hack your way into other 'Bots of various roles, to increase your numbers and performs certain tasks, which were pretty hard. The graphics were wireframe 3D, and I was still utterly lost in that world for months.

[end oldgit mode[

Anyway, I think the processor cycles could have been better applied

Nuts, that was me

I think we all agree that games have suffered from a lack of creativity in recent years favoring increased sales over better plotting or gameplay. I realize that Games are a business and money has to be made, but is it too much for there to be something vaguely new instead of the next GTA clone or MMORPG of the month?

According to some, FS2 itself is an example of that problem, Lib.

Yeah, but those nuts in the wing commander scene don't count.


(It was the WC guys who blame FS2 for the death of the genre, right?)

I blame the cheesy WC:Prophecy with it's knockoff of the FS with the talking bugs.

You misunderstand, Moonsword(do you listen to Boortz?), eyecandy is great so long as it advances the story, the moment it, indeed any element of the game, upstages the story the path has been lost.

Case in point: Homeworld 2

HW2 is potent in every category. However, the story is upstaged by the awe-inspiring graphics and the insane difficulty of the tasks required of the player. As such HW2 is typically felt to be inferior to it's predacessors despite the overall improvement of the graphics and game balance.

Raa wrote:Yeah, but those nuts in the wing commander scene don't count.


(It was the WC guys who blame FS2 for the death of the genre, right?)

I still wonder how in Hel,l Loaf and Kris created that big WC community because well those 2 are errr *TARDS! and 2 biggest WC community Trolls



anyway I been playing Children of the nilea while and it's good game

Oh yes, it IS good, if you want a version of Sim-City set in Egypt, then this is your game. However, the original had more variation and variety, it was that which I preferred.

Although IMO you can better develop a player-NPC relationship (for storytelling) with 3d characters than 2D.....

Pharoh kicks arse. That's all I can really add to this conversation...

liberator wrote:I think we all agree that games have suffered from a lack of creativity in recent years favoring increased sales over better plotting or gameplay. I realize that Games are a business and money has to be made, but is it too much for there to be something vaguely new instead of the next GTA clone or MMORPG of the month?

The thing is that innovative games tend to sell poorly even when they are pretty damn good. Hostile Waters for instance doesn't even really have a genre it belongs to because apart from Battlezone I can't think of anything like it. Despite getting excellent reviews not many people have even heard of it let alone played it.

The problem is not just the games industry. It's the consummer. If people keep buying the latest GTA clone or MMORPG of the month then they'll keep on making them.

Thing is that it's always been this way. IIRC I still have copies of Your Sinclair tucked away somewhere in the house. If I looked at the reviews I'd bet I'd find page after page of "me too" games in there too.

Hell, I remember both the SNES and NES having tonnes of copycat crap.......