These last few weeks I've split my time between two games, Pharaoh for Windows 9x and Virtua Fighter 3tb for Dreamcast. Gaming is a great stress reliever and a nice way to waste that half hour you didn't know what to do with.
Pharaoh is a building game in the purest sense. The time is ancient Egypt and you are a noble with plans of improving your family by following Pharaoh's orders and managing his cities. Each level you are the next generation of your family and are given a new city to create and develop. The level starts with an empty stretch of land, a purse of gold and goals in four categories: culture, prosperity, monument and kingdom. Basic game play works like this: you build housing to entice people to settle, roads to connect them and buildings to give them employment. You have house, feed, employ, entertain, allow worship and defend your citizens. When you place a building on a road a person comes out and looks for employees; once it has employees the building sends out a representative to walk a certain distance to the left and right of the building. This representative brings it's effect to any buildings on their route; food from the market, a priest from the temple, books from the library. The trick comes in laying out the roads without interfering with the walker, since at each intersection they have to decide which way to go. For a house to evolve to it's most valuable level it needs to be touched by all the buildings that have a positive effect; industrial and defensive buildings have a negative effect as they do today in our society, but are required none the less. For the city to thrive you need cash, which requires trade and so needs commodities. The game is woven so tightly together you can't help but be drawn in. The only problem is the monuments; Pharaoh asks that pyramids, obelisks and the like be built. Of course these are huge projects that require ridiculous amounts of stone, labourers and most importantly time. I've had all my requirements completed and had to wait three real hours for a pyramid to complete. I realize these are the focal points for the level, but that's a little extreme. Let me give you two tips that have helped a lot: build as many straight roads as possible, and start the monuments as early in the level as possible. Pharaoh is highly recommended and deserves a look. Go to www.pharaoh1.com, grab the demo and see for yourself. Right now there is a contest on the site: every week a new map is posted, and once completed and emailed the designers judge the best and give awards. A nice way to reward the game player, and create a sense of online community with a single player game.
Virtua Fighter is a mainstay of the arcades and console systems; an excellent martial arts game that has stood the test of time through it's incarnations. I can't count the hours and quarters I wasted at the Seven-Eleven mastering my skills, but luckily my youth wasn't a total loss. Virtua Fighter 3tb is the newest version, brought to us on the Sega Dreamcast. What do we get this time around: a direct port of the arcade version with a team battle mode where you pick multiple fighters and go through them until somebody uses theirs up, hence the "tb" in the title. The game play is all about choosing the right attack to hit your opponent; no random button pushing here, this game is based on the players skill and knowledge of their character's moves. What does this one bring to the fighting genre? Real terrain that affects the character's stance and how they fight plus multiple camera angles that give so many ways to watch your opponent go down. The terrain really affects the fight, as you can be above or below your opponent. Different camera angles are nice, but take getting used to since we're used to just one. What's lacking? Although there are fourteen characters and thirteen levels, it doesn't feel like a big selection or a long game. While I enjoyed the depth of the moves and combinations available, the characters looked blocky and their movements felt stiff. Overall Virtua Fighter 3tb is a great martial arts game, all Dreamcast fighters will be compared to Soul Caliber and the standard it set. Check out www.sega.com/games/games_vf3.shtml and get the straight goods from the source.
by Scott VanderPloeg
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