Who's your mummy?

By Relly Carpio, hackenslash Contributor INQUIRER.net "I will not be dictated to, I will not be threatened. I am the morning and evening star, I am Pharaoh!" -- "Prince of Egypt" IT is by your will and decision where the city shall lie along the great banks of the Nile. It is by your wisdom what crops shall be sown after the inundation. It is by your leave when the priests will have their joyous celebrations, exulting the gods. It is by your command how those who dare challenge your rule will fall. Pharaoh may not be a game for everyone, especially now that the fad for "gamers" is first-person shooter Half-Life clones (which any real gamer will instantly recognize as Quake 2 progeny, but that's another review). Riding on the fame of the SimCity game fad which took the world by storm then, Pharaoh and its predecessors, the Caesar series were a historical alternative to the present-day sprawls of Will Wright and the boys and girls at Maxis Software. It was a fair alternative to SimAnt and SimFarm. This game is part of the City Building Series that was published by Sierra Entertainment and Myelin Media. This particular game was developed by Impressions Games and those familiar with it will instantly see that it uses the Caesar III engine. Pharaoh was released in October 1999, and has an expansion, Queen of the Nile: Cleopatra. The game received fair acclaim when it was launched. Surprised? One should consider that the game was released after the movie "The Mummy" was shown in the summer of 1999. And the year before that, Disney's "Prince of Egypt" came out. You begin the game as a "person in charge" of an area that has to be developed. Success means you get promoted and you move on to the next mission. Failure means death. No, you can't hold a snap election and extend your terms. The elite Royal Guards storming your city gates and slaughtering everything in their path should be enough evidence that Pharoah is not pleased. As you progress your Family slowly gets entangled in the politics of ancient Egypt until eventually you become Pharaoh. But even then, you answer to the people, the priests, and the gods. Yes, there are gods. Crime is the least of your problems in this game. As with Caesar, Pharaoh also has its share of divine problems. There are gods in the game that have to be constantly appeased and worshipped. Should a god find itself lacking a temple in any of your city areas, there will be trouble. In the city grid, temples and eventually the massive temple complex will occupy the most space second only to designated living areas. There is usually a patron god aside from the other gods in every mission. Being mindful of the needs of this specific god above the others will ensure the survival of your city. Each of the missions has goals that need to be fulfilled before you can move on to the next city and mission. If any of the goals are not fulfilled, then the game just goes on and on. Usually the requirements include a certain population, the better the city, and the better the quality of the housing allows for more people to live in a smaller area. Then there are the ratings that you need to fulfill, namely: Culture (making your city close to the Egyptian standard), Prosperity (making your people happy), Monument (making pyramids, obelisks, the Sphinx), and Kingdom (making the rest of the kingdom view your rule favorably). Now the population doesn't idly sit around and watch you; they actually do the work. No population means no workers, thus the city will fall into ruin. There are overseers (the city council/computer) that automatically tell everyone what to do after you assign areas and buildings for what they are. But most overseers can be overridden and one of the most important is the Overseer of the Workers. Left alone it tries to spread the workers all over the place. But realistically there are more people in food production and industry. Left alone, unless there is a surplus of workers (a.k.a. unemployment), you will have starving people on one side of the city and people swimming in it on the other. Oh, and commerce grinds to a halt as goods get stuck in the storage yards. On that note, we get to the most important part of the game, trade. In Pharaoh you trade with other cities in the kingdom and with other kingdoms like Greece and Babylon. You begin the city with a certain amount of start-up money (they call it debens, not gold). If you don't export something soon, this will run out. Early in the game, the missions will not need trade. But later on, without it, expect the soldiers of the Pharaoh in your city, to "collect" on his investment. There will be goods that you might need to import to improve your city, and you need something to export to make money. Sometimes you actually import the cheap raw materials and then export the expensive finished product. The economy system of the game is actually very good in teaching the realities of how import/export works and how it affects the economy of an area. With trade and economy comes the end result: battle. Yes, there is battle. This is what sets Pharaoh apart from most of the city building sims. You have to build an army and/or navy and actually use it to defend your city, sometimes, defend another city by sending them there, or yourself from the Pharaoh. This fact is what gives Pharaoh its real-time strategy facet and woe betide a city that finds itself defenseless. The combat is laughable and at times is annoying as the graphics border on the comic; but the effects are all too real. If an enemy force attacks a building, it gets destroyed; and as long as there they are on your map, no one will immigrate to your city. No population means no workers, thus the city will fall into ruin. As a whole the game is fantastic as it actually teaches the basics of politics, providing basic services, concept of immigration/emigration, realities of import/export, effect of warfare on an economy and population, and the religious festivals and culture of an ancient race. There is even a section in the Game Help that discusses the real history on which the game is based on, in case you need a National Geographic fix along the way. Game Tips: If at the start it seems slow and daunting, be patient; soon there will be so many city options you won't be fast enough to set up services before trouble starts happening. There are numerous missions that you have to go through, and in the later missions it will take time and planning, the pause button and safety saves will be your best friend. It's okay to play the game on "Very Easy" difficulty setting as the game engine only increases cost of building and ramps up the chaos engine with every difficulty increment. If your city planning is quirky from the start it won't matter what your difficulty setting is, your city will not work, and the monuments will still take a thousand years to finish. On that note: it will eventually come to a point that you will fall asleep waiting for the monuments to finish. Waiting for the monuments to finish will be the most challenging part of the game as you will spend hours doing nothing but maintaining the city and watching your populace place one block on top of the other. Planning the construction sites before hand will make a very big difference, and the finished monuments are worth the wait, always. Use roadblocks; they concentrate services throughout areas. Lastly, it is better to have a burning house than an angry god; keep the faith.