Time-wasting - Emperor

Five day working weeks can really numb a creative mind sometimes. I recently signed up to Good Old Games - where you can buy old games which have been patched to run on newer computers, and am planning to indulge in some kind of quarter-life crisis by picking up a couple of nostalgic gems.

To start it off, I picked up Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, a city-building management game brought to us by BreakAway Games and Impression Games. The developers are apparently quite fond of historical city builders, providing similar titles like Caesar and Pharaoh, set in Ancient Rome and Ancient Egypt respectively.

Anyway, Emperor is essentially SimCity but in Ancient China. There are seven campaigns spanning from the time of the prehistoric Xia Dynasty to the medieval Song Jin Dynasty, with missions which involve building up a city, keeping your houses supplied with goods, establishing trade with other cities, and fending off whatever barbarians are looking for a fight. While these barbarians can be a problem, the game is more about managing the infrastructure of your own city rather than conquering others. Oh, but make sure you pay regular tributes to the Ancestral gods. If they get angry, bad stuff will happen.

The game can get very frustrating at times. There's nothing worse than having levelled up all your houses, only for a hemp shortage to drop them down all those levels and cause everybody to leave. Or having a trading post full of silk and carved jade collapse because a salamander wandered into the road and killed the building inspector.

Yeah, there's a lot of micromanagement involved, but that's what makes the game immersive. You can grind away so many hours on just one mission - especially if there's a monument involved. And despite the game's age, the visuals are stunning.

Now maybe I can resist the temptation to start the next campaign.