Caesar 3

From around 1995 to 2000, before I switched to RPG's, I heavily played most of the popular building games, with Caesar III being my top favorite. At the moment I don't have the time to play involved, long games and sometimes I just want to play a casual game. Caesar III popped into my head, and I also remembered that a friend of mine was very positive about GOG.com some time ago. So, I went here, bought and downloaded the game, and installed it. It worked without a hitch, and 10 minutes after registering here I was running the game. I breezed through the tutorial as if I never stopped playing this game. Honestly I don't know if GOG.com can modify and/or patch older games (do they get the source code?) but it runs 100% perfect on Win7 x64. And all this, for the neglectable price of €4,-. Maybe I'll just rebuy and redownload all my Baldur's Gate 1, 2, Icewind Dale 1, 2 and Planescape games also, if GOG had the ability to fix problems they have on newer systems.

Caesar III is a Roman city-building simulator where you have to build the ideal Roman city using handfuls of buildings at your disposal. Build houses to give the settlers shelter, give them food, employment, entertainment, fire protection, water, and places of worship (lest the gods get angry with you), and provide government establishments to keep the plebs in line. On the surface it seems simple enough, but it's a circus. I was on the second campaign mission and the game just literally fell apart right before my eyes. The objective was to build farms so I could fill up a granary. Then I got messages to build reservoirs for water, fountains, markets, and all the while trying to provide prefectures and engineering stations to keep my buildings from catching on fire and falling down. Also the game kept telling me I didn't have enough workers to do all of the jobs that were in the city and then when I built more houses, the game kept telling me the workers were eating more food than was being produced, and I fit as many farms as I could into the small area they gave me to build farms in... Then since I was too preoccupied with building houses and farms, and wondering what else I needed to build, I forgot to build temples, so all of the gods started smiting me at once. Then new areas where I had built houses and other buildings started to catch fire since I was just rapidly placing houses down to try and get enough people to work my buildings... and it all just went downhill from there. This is the SECOND mission. I can't imagine how bad it's going to get further down the line... Play at your own peril...

I might be a bit of a city building fanatic. I have Caesar III & IV, Zeus + Expansion, Emperor, and Pharoah + Expansion. Caesar III was the first I played, and still one of my favourite games. Building cities is so much fun, and you can build them how you want. The Military Dictator holding off the ravaging hordes? Sure. The benevolant ruler with all his working class in top housing? Sure. Leaving the Plebs in the tents where they belong and giving your nobility the most luxurious palaces possible? Etc. Etc. The Campaign is a good tutorial that eases you into the game brilliantly, but not so slow that you get bored - it gets tricky quite quickly. The combat is good but not so important as to detract from the other aspects. You'll find that the main joy of this game is the building up of the city, and balancing employment and population. Compared to other games like Sim City, the game has a much faster action to reaction ratio, so you can see quite quickly what effect you have on the city. Get it. It's awesome. Here's to hoping that GOG brings the others here too - while all of the sets are quite similar, there's enough quirks and differences between each game to make them all equally enjoyable.

Caesar 3 is a game I enjoyed deeply as a kid. If any title deserves ranking amongst the "Good Old Games" (thank you GOG <3) it's Caesar 3. The gameplay, graphics, complexity, voice-acting, music etc are of tremendous standard. Though not the only strategy game with an Ancient Rome setting, but few games in general (not just Roman) have this much depth on the politics and economics that came with building and governing cities implemented within its gameplay. Even as an old video game, it takes you in to its historical setting in a way that even more modern masterpieces have not. While the game is well-made and relatively bug-free, it loses 1 star for its difficulty. Even on easier settings, Caesar 3 requires a lot of patience and skill. It's not that the game isn't completable, but one must not be surprised if (even earlier in the campaign) one has to restart a level because they failed or have lost the chance to be victorious in it. If you have the patience for the challenge though, you will find an addictive and rewarding experience. Anyone really into simulations, RTS's, and having deep fascination with Roman history cannot go wrong with this game.

A lot of old games I've played definitely deliver on a sense of nostalgia. But, Caesar 3 surprised me, it's legitimately a great game even by today's standards. The graphics hold up very well (imo the 2d graphics from this era aged a lot better than 3d from the same era). If I'm being honest, my only real gripe is the behavior/controls for military units is not great. Having said that, it's the only thing that's struck me as a pain since returning to this game. There's a great open source project, 'julius', that adds really nice wide-screen support. I can't recommend it enough. If anyone reading this has played the stronghold HD versions, the julius mod feels a lot like that. Same old game, except it looks right on a modern machine.