There's an episode of The Simpsons in which Marge, feeling restless, asks Bart to go for a walk in the sunshine. He irritably declines. "Mom, can't you see I'm playing a video game?" As Marge issues her characteristic grumble and heads for the door, we get a shot of the game Bart's playing. The avatar, a boy, is strolling on a pavement past a park bench. It's called something like Sunshine Walk Simulator.
The writers of The Simpsons have typically taken a somewhat satirical and sarcastic view of video games, but with Sunshine Walk Simulator they struck upon a crucial point: often, activities that are tedious in real life are, inexplicably, fun in game form.
Take town planning. Very few people grow up thinking, "When I'm older, I want to decide where businesses should build their premises," but games depicting exactly that can consume weeks of your life at a time, monopolising your attention and keeping you from more edifying pursuits, such as drinking and watching television.
Glory of the Roman Empire (already a multi-format success story) is set in the highly fertile landscape of Rome's ancient history. As a Curator Viarum, your task is to build a series of profitable towns, earning promotions as you progress from simple to more complicated settlements.
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The land at the start of every level is a hotchpotch of mineable rock, woodland, grass, and water. By hovering the cursor over a patch of ground and pressing the action button, you enter the building menu and choose what type of building to put down from an impressively long list, covering such diverse industries as herbalism, fishing, pottery, theatre, and pig farming.
There's such a huge number of building types, in fact, that the game soon becomes an exercise in parsimony as you learn to judge which production to start off first and which to leave on the planning room floor.
Obeying the natural order of production flows is the best way to ensure that you build a profitable settlement – a mine should be attached to a smithy, which should be attached to a warehouse, and so on. The upshot of this is that a given commodity takes more space to produce that it first appears, so while the quarry may only take up five squares, the structures that accompany it take up many more.
As well as more obviously commercial structures, you need to include residences and amenities like temples, marketplaces, theatres, public baths and so on. Your city isn't only valued on the amount of money it generates but also on the well-being of the population, reflected in the value of the property.
Aside from this, the only constraint concerning where you build is that, with certain buildings, a part of the structure must be attached to a particular part of the landscape. A quarry has to append to rock, for instance, while a fishery needs to have one of its squares overhanging water. As a result, you'll spend most of your time using the rotate function to spin pieces around and find places to put them.
And yes, that's as easy as it sounds. Despite the seeming membership of the strategy genre, Glory of the Roman Empire is really a simulation of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle.
The game is impeccably packaged with intricate graphics, a credibly dramatic score, and a host of lavish Latin terms which imbue it with a scholarly air that belies its utter simplicity. Glory of the Roman Empire is neither deep nor difficult, but it is the best-dressed jigsaw puzzle in all of Rome.
Glory of the Roman Empire boasts pretty visuals and a bouquet of lush Latin terms, although when you look under the lid things are simpler than they first appear
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