"Lords of the Realm: III"
by Zephyr "Death of Monkeys" McMundersondelsonderson
Yes, I realize you've never heard of this game. Only insane diehard fans of LOTR could have looked past LOTR 2 and sat through the entire twelve ass-numbing endings of ROTK. Oh, wait. Forgot what I was talking about there. Lord of the Rings rocked! As a matter of fact, so did Lords of the Realm. If you haven't heard of it, it was this kickass game released back in one of those really boring years we had a while back, about conquering bits of Europe through trade, diplomacy, and warfare, building up your little villages and making them into vassal states with castles and siege engines, the whole works. You could farm wheat or cattle, live off of the bread or cheese or meat and sell the extra or store it in times of need, send huge armies of peasants over the border to forage in your enemy's land and eat all their food, and so on. You could do absolutely everything and you had to, to win; it was a micromanager's paradise.
But you know what really made the game great? It was turn-based, with realtime (but pause-able) combat. Let me say that again: it was great because it was turn-based. Now before you start into your asinine lecture about how realtime is better in all things, think about it for a second; this is a micromanaging strategy game. Allowing you to make all the decisions and then end your turn allowed you to have a clear and useful strategy with which you actually had some chance of beating the computer. Let's face it, the real strategy in true strategy games is in the micromanagement, and you simply can't beat a computer at micromanaging in real-time. That's why people are always bitching about "real-time strategy" games being too much micromanaging; you can't win if it's realtime and you have to actually apply a complex and coherent strategy. Real-time strategy is, except for PvP in which everyone's on the same footing, an oxymoron.
So you have this really great turn-based strategy game, and in LOTR2 what do they do? Well, they turn the pausing off in battles. So okay, no biggie, you can't really strategize in battles, but if you want to be pure strategy you can turn off the battles completely and the computer will do them strictly by the numbers. (Who would actually do that, I don't know, but the option was there.) The logic being, "you can't actually strategize in battles, it's just this huge disorganized mess of pikemen and bowmen and flying squirrel bombs and things, so we'll make it more realistic that way." Fine.
But then, in LOTR3, they took that idea one step further and said, "you know, you can't really just stop *time* while you're thinking of what you want to do. So let's just take the turn-based element out altogether and make it purely real-time." What Sierra forgot was what a lot of people who try to make their games realistic forget: real battles aren't fun. I'm not playing this game to get the experience of sending actual men to their deaths in pursuit of some crown, I'm playing because I want to be entertained. Now, if I bought the last two LOTR games, you might think my particular demographic would include the concept "enjoys turn-based strategy games." I mean, it's not like there aren't a trillion other so-called realtime strategy games out there; did they really think I was just playing 1 and 2 because I hadn't heard of this amazing new breakthrough in technology that prevents me from going and having a coke or getting a phone call without getting my ass kicked in the game? Please. I played them, and in fact still do play them, because they're fun. Strategy is about thinking, not reacting. If I want to change my method of play I can think about it for a while and then try it out, I don't have to make split-second diplomacy decisions as my armies get slaughtered. I mean, who wants to play a game like that? If anybody does, I bet we've got a copy here we can let go cheap.
In summary, I would give this game a B.A., which in some circles means a Bachelor of Arts degree, but since I don't have a spare one of those lying around it's going to mean Beneath my Ass, and yes I am currently sitting on the only copy licensed by Gamepope Intl., which means Mr. Funny Shoes gets all my ass germs when he tries to return it to the bowels of Hell (er, Sierra) from whence it came. But three out of four voices in my head agree, it's NOT AS BAD as having to play this game for six hours straight. Unsummoning ass germs is only a level 3 cleric spell after all, whereas causing this game not to suck would take, I don't know, three lobotomies and a masochism injection.
Verb. Sap. Time files.