I remember getting hold of a shareware cd containing Caesar II and playing the demo endlessly.
It's one of the few games out of the 90's that I still fire up on a regular basis, time as an adult does seem to fly by faster and faster, so regular in my case seems to indicate every 2 months or so.
I came across a local listing selling the complete boxed copy of the game for only €5! So I jumped on the opportunity to get a physical copy of the game I've been adoring for over 29 years.
Ah 1995....
Friends is in it's second season;
Windows 95 is here and the browser wars were heating up;
Netscape went public;
I envied those who were already playing PSX games while I still had a NES;
Pentiums were reaching speeds of around 90 to 120mhz;
On with the show. The bottom of the box lists the system requirements:
Minimums: 486 SX-25 Hard Drive 8MB RAM SVGA 640x480x256 Colors Mouse 2x CD-ROM Drive
Don't you just love it that in 1995 you still had to put a label on the box to ensure that there wasn't anyone who would try to run the game on a pc without a hard drive?
For premium performance: 486 DX-33 Local Bus Video SoundBlaster or 100% Compatible
Nothing that my trusty old Thinkpad 2645 (with a Pentium II 450Mhz) can't handle.
- A Sierra software registration card
- Installation instructions
- Quick Reference Card explaining the basic controls
- A game manual with over 100 pages explaining every game aspect in detail
- CD-ROM with the game
- An advertisement for the official Caesar 2 strategy guide
As a kid, I remember the rides home after buying a game in the store and just browsing through the manual, just imagining all the fun that lay ahead.
It's a city building game, set in the Roman times.
You need to find balance between expanding your city, keeping it's citizens happy, growing the economy and keeping enemies at bay.
People always keep stealing money from my temples, yet when I add prefectures to protect them, the land value gets lowered and again my citizens are unhappy! In case of doubt, you can never add enough plaza's and gardens!
To keep the city running, you need to allocate enough resources to take care of it. If you don't, there will be a loud voice shouting 'PLEBS ARE NEEDED'. Failure to assign more plebs to your city services will definitely result in fires, riots and other unpleasantness that the game will throw at you.
Once you have figured out how to run your city, you can take a look at the province level, from there you can build ports, farms and create garrisons to keep the barbarians at bay.
It's time to allow yourself to binge on some nostalgia, you've earned it.
You'll have no problems finding the game; Scour the abandonware websites, thrift the game, or heck just play the demo, it all runs perfectly well under DOSBox and most late 90's to early 00's pc's..
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Retro Replay: Caesar II for MS-DOS (1995) was published on 2024-05-21
