I don’t remember hating them at the time, just really disliking going back to them after I experienced something better later.
Pharaoh is one of my favorite games of all times. Something so satisfying about building those monuments. Since I wasn’t a great player, some of them took a loooong time. It was great.
Same here – I still remember the excitement I felt as I neared completion of a pyramid.
Also, I liked the walkers, even though I didn’t completely understand them. I’d play a new city-builder game with walkers.
Activision inherited all of VUG’s properties, so unless something happened to the Impressions titles, that’s where they sit.
To be clear, I actually love the walker system overall. It’s just the requirement in Pharaoh (and Caesar) that an industrial building has to be connected to housing that I don’t like (it sends out walkers called Recruiters, I think, and won’t start working until the recruiter encounters a house). It required you to build little worker slums separate from your main residential areas. Zeus and Emperor dropped that requirement, and I think it’s an improvement.
Cool! Hadn’t heard of Lethis. I’ll check it out. Thanks for the heads-up.
Yep. Pcgamer used to have disks with software, including game demos.
On the very first one I bought there was Age of Wonders, Thief, Pharaoh, Battlezone.
Talk about an introduction to pc gaming!!!
I picked up Pharaoh for the first time a couple years back (my wife has fond memories from her childhood, which really surprised me because she’s mostly a non-gamer, especially so as a child). I really liked it, and made through the whole game in one go (i.e. not playing other games in between). I tried out Cleopatra and wasn’t quite sure about it (especially the timed missions) but then got into it again. I still have to finish the last couple scenarios, I believe.
I then got Zeus + Poseidon (GoG is great, isn’t it), and I loved the mythological additions (heroes, monsters) and the increased freedom with diplomacy. But really the whole artistic presentation of it just rubbed me wrong. I don’t mind the graphics as dated (Pharaoh is great), but everything was so cartoony. The main example that I can point to is that the columns in many of the buildings aren’t straight, but rather cartoonishly curved. This is then amplified by the intentionally silly narrative style of the missions (which I usually don’t have a problem ignoring), even down to the names of the walkers and their little catchphrases. I don’t know why it bugs me so much but it just seems off to me.
I still played through several of the campaigns, don’t get me wrong. But I started on the Atlantis ones, and they just didn’t seem different enough–ok, there are some new resources and “science” buildings, but they really just seem like a rearrangement rather than anything new. So I don’t think I’ll continue on that one.
But Pharaoh is great. Maybe it’s also because there’s so little of any media set in ancient Egypt, so it seems more interesting to me. e.g. I ended up contrasting Zeus with AC: Odyssey, and it really was no comparison as far as getting into the setting. (Granted it’s not a fair comparison, because of the advancement of technology, game design, and (not least of all) budget, but it’s one that kept coming up in my head anyway.)
There were folks at the time who hated the “cartoonish” graphic presentation of Zeus and the presence of gods among the people in that game.
Frankly, I think Zeus was the perfect city builder strategy game of that entire era. It was tremendous.
It’s not Pharoah, but if Caesar 3 will do, there’s an open source remake, you still need the original:
Search for it on youtube, thinks it’s pretty well developed already.
There’s also an Impressions-inspired Aztec game under development, open source, I believe:
My memory may be rosy, but I recall the Impressions games as relaxing and fun, not stressful or frantic. By contrast, much as I appreciate the complexity of the supply chains in Anno 1800, that game stresses me out. I feel overwhelmed in it, as if it’s too much multasking. When I think back to the Impressions games, I think fondly of watching cubes pile up here and there. But as I say, memory may be tricking me.
I basically agree with everything you said about Zeus’ visuals and humor. It’s grown on me now, but I really didn’t like the cartooniness when it came out, because I was used to the historical groundedness of the previous Impressions games (although they’ve ALWAYS had silly lines from the walkers). So Zeus is my favorite because of many of the gameplay improvements and some of the storytelling stuff. And Pharaoh also intentionally introduced wrinkles into things to make it challenging–the best examples being the bandstands and pavillions that don’t allow you to build simple circuits, or the wheat farms that also make straw. Zeus just plays much more smoothly and pleasantly.
But Pharaoh’s setting and the enormous constructions are fantastic. A Pharaoh game with all those Zeus improvements included would be my ideal city builder.
I, too, love the walkers. I also like the fact that you need low-level housing near workplaces because it actually fits the theme. Ancient Egypt had entire villages with run-of-the-mill housing filled with labourers.
Totally true. It’s definitely realistic to have a lower class ghetto! Although if they wanted to be realistic, I assume those worker areas would be a lot bigger than the fancy upper class enclaves, and in Pharaoh you literally need one house with a few folks in it.
Screwing around with universal road blocks was the real issue with the walkers. I am sure if they had settings on the road blocks it would work a lot better.
A feature they added in Emperor! I don’t really miss them in Zeus, but they’re still pretty spiffy.
I thought there was one that moved us forward and then Emperor hosed the genre by going back to it.
I didn’t hate the walkers persay, it’s just the tools to guide them wasn’t there. The other systems had their problems too. Like Glory had those circles which you had to weirdly overlap and didn’t really show you anything… walkers at least gave you visual ques. And then someone else had that green building thing, pretty much the same as a circle except minus the circle. COTN had them go to the market which was kind of fun so them walking but actually a walker.
Pretty sure Emperor had all the nice-to-have features of Zeus. It’s just that no one played it!
I like COTN, too, although sometimes you sit and yell at the people wondering why they’re doing one thing and not the thing that REALLY NEEDS TO BE DONE PLEASE!
Walkers are systemic, not smart. That makes them unrealistic and frustrating in their own way. But I think it also makes them clear and manipulatable (with the tools they gave you, as you say).