The Games
Railroad Tycoon 1 Deluxe
Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon is a simulation of rare complexity. It re-creates the rise of railroading as it became perhaps the
most powerful single industry in the world. The game is thorough and constructs a world so involving that it is easy to lose
track of time and go into marathon mode.
Yet to its great credit, Railroad Tycoon never becomes bogged down by its considerable detail. Thanks to thoughtful program
design and documentation that's entertaining and informative, MicroProse' s Railroad Tycoon achieves an impressive level of
reality without sacrificing playability.
The game casts you in the role of a hopeful entrepreneur with one million dollars in capital to invest in a new railroad. From
there you're on your own, with only a map of the area in which you choose to play (Eastern U.S., Western U.S., England, or
Europe), geographically accurate and ripe with resources.
From these humble beginnings you must build your empire, battling competing railroads, playing the stock market - even buying the
competition, siphoning cash from it, and taking over its routes.
Heroes of Might & Magic 1
Heroes of Might and Magic is very similar to its forefather King's Bounty, a light RPG
released by New World in 1990. Heroes greatly enhances the concept and adds much more of a
strategy element to the mix. The gameplay itself is simple, yet beating the computer is not. The AI of the game is among the best
I have encountered. You can't make too many mistakes or you'll find
your own castle gates locked against you.
Not muddled in a lumbering storyline, Heroes invites you to jump straight into the action by
choosing one of four different player types, Knight, Barbarian, Sorceress, or Warlock, each with
specific powers and followers. Depending on the scenario, which can range from short games played out on a small map to expansive
adventures, you will have a goal that you must achieve to win the
game.
Heroes is not a simpleminded game -- there are a variety of subtle strategies you
can employ. Do you want to lead a pack of ogres, who are powerful but slow? If so,
you better hope your wizard learns that teleport spell so he can speed them into
battle. Those elven archers sure are nice with their two shots per turn,
but they sure do attract a lot of enemy attention. Why don't you move your wolves in
front of them so the gryphons can't attack the elves? And that is just the beginning.
The most powerful units are expensive and are best utilized by a thoughtful strategist.
Conquest of the New World Deluxe Edition
For its time Conquest featured fantastic landscape graphics. In the standard strategy tradition, players move their various
pieces (including explorers, colonists, and soldiers) through a blacked-out world, uncovering beautiful mountains, plains, and
rivers. The first player to discover any landmark gets to name it. After mapping out some of the local terrain, the next step is
to build a colony and make it self-sufficient. To this end, players can build sawmills, metal mines, housing, and farms to
generate the resources and space necessary to expand, and eventually, to build more colonies. Then comes the hard part:
convincing the natives and other countries of the world that you are a force to be reckoned with.
As with any good strategy game, combat is an inevitability in Conquest of the New World, and Interplay has done an excellent job
here as well. Combat takes place on a simple three-by-four grid; each competing combatant controls three different unit types
(infantry, cavalry, and artillery) and attacks other forces with varying success, depending on the skill of the army's leaders.
This abstract warfare system works extremely well, offering players a chance to affect the outcome of their battles through
tactical skill, while keeping each individual conflict relatively short (most battles take between three and six minutes).
Thanks to its outstanding features—the naming of geographic markers (nothing is as satisfying as mountains and rivers named after
gastrointestinal disorders), historical atmosphere, customizable play (you can align yourself with a nationality that matches
your particular style) Conquest of the World manages to take an interesting era and makes it into a fantastic strategy game.
X-COM: UFO Defense
You are in control of X-Com, an organization formed by the
world's governments to fight the ever-increasing alien menace.
Shooting down UFOs is just the beginning: you must then lead a
squad of heavily-armed soldiers across different terrains as they
investigate the UFO crash site. Tackle the aliens with automatic
rifles, rocket launchers, and even tanks in the struggle to retrieve
useful technology, weapons or life forms.
You must make every crucial decision as you combat the powerful
alien forces. But you'll also need to watch the world political
situation: governments may be forced into secret pacts with the
aliens and then begin to reduce X-Com funding.
Civilization 1
For the unititated, the concept seems simple: Take an Earth-like planet, add various primitive nomad clans, and see what
develops. The ultimate goal of Civilization is to advance your chosen civilization from a group of stone age hut-builders to a
democratic empire capable of colonizing Alpha Centauri. This would be easy if you didn't have any opposition, wouldn't it?
You start at the dawn of recorded history - 4000 B.C. and the founding of the first cities - then nurture your society toward the
Space Age. In the beginning, you'll labor to simply survive while building your settlements, discovering new technologies, and
fending off barbarians. You control settlers, military units, trade caravans, diplomats, scientists, entertainers, and other
entities in your quest to carve out your civilization in the rock of time.
This game was an instant classic, and will probably be a favorite for years to come. It's replay value is infinite, allowing
completely different experiences every time it's turned on. On top of that, it's as addicting as computer games get.
Note: My compatibility CD does not alter the retail game or bypass copy protection. It allows the original media to install and run correctly on any recent version of Windows.
