Age of Mythology: Retold

As many would know, strategy games aren't really my forte but this one has somehow made it into our Friday night game sessions and has probably become my most played strategy one for awhile. Obviously the co-op component helps a lot, though you can only co-op two players if going through the campaign story. That's ok though as there are many other modes that you can play through which is good, given my graphics card bombs out on some of the maps too.

A standard game round has you selecting your civilization (Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Atlantean, etc) followed by a major deity in that civilization - so for a Norse player you'd be choosing between Loki, Odin or Thor for example, each giving you slightly different "god" powers and "tech" trees in the form of minor gods who you get to pick as you advance from age to age.

Usually you get a town center, some peasants and some form of scout of your civilization type and from there have to collect food, wood, gold and favor to expand up through the ages. Favor is your battery for magical powers or making magical creatures and you how you gain it depends on your civilization. Atlanteans gain it by having their oracles stand as far apart from each other as possible. Greeks gain it by having as many people worshiping at the temple. Norse get it by killing enemies, and so forth.

AI wise, the fun bit is getting the mix n match of their personality types. A few examples are the defender who only defends, an attacker will constantly harass you, a humanoid will ignore all magic-related things and just fight you with men and machines, and an overwhelmer will just mass a big ball of troops and then throw it at you if you wait too long. You can also up the "difficulty" by letting the AI cheat basically if you really want a challenge (your peasant hits a tree once and gains 1 wood, their peasant hits a tree once and gains 1-3x wood).

It's simple enough to learn and fun enough to keep playing. Coming from me, a non strategy game player whose PC can't even run 1/4th of it properly, that's saying something so it must be doing something right! :)

Exodus: Gods and Kings & Prince of Egypt (1998)

A tale of two Moses?

Continuing from my previous religious movie review, these two stories follow the life of Moses - adapted son of the pharaoh who learns of his past, goes away for a bit and due to an encounter on a mountain returns a changed man with a mission to set all the slaves free. Obviously there are differences between the two, and I'm talking more than just one has Christian Bale and the other is a cartoon with a lot of singing. We'll look at Exodus first.

The movie opens with a bit of reading and that's never a good thing if your movie doesn't include the words "Star Wars" in the title. Bale's Moses is a skilled warrior who has no problem shanking enemies with swords when he feels like, and he feels like it often. He's also starts out as an atheist who only believes in himself. It's a little odd but hey, they wanted something new so that's fine.

Despite this he seems to be the favored "son" of the pharaoh since Ramses in this movie doesn't really understand the managerial part of his position. I should point out too that while Moses here ages it seems Ramses doesn't. Must have good genes? The time skips were also... sudden?

Warrior Moses personally sending people to hell!

Anywho, this movie tries to down play the powers and plagues (apart from the last one) in an attempt to make things more plausible rather than miraculous. The 3D effects of these are awesome, but they do make Moses look like a bit of a crazy chump on the sidelines and not actively doing anything.

In the Prince of Egypt, Moses is a scoundrel and trouble maker but that doesn't stop him from being good friends with his step brother, Ramses. He does kill someone too but it really shatters him entirely (unlike Bale's more ruthless counterpart). He also sticks to the staff wielding version which basically makes him the main conduit for everything to flow through. It's good to see that the Egyptian priests also had powers from their own gods to show off too, but more or less everything goes exactly as you'd expect which is surprising given the amount of death.

Wizard Moses ponders if he should attack the darkness, or summon it.

Art wise, Dreamworks did a good job here and all the character animation is fantastic. The part that involves the hieroglyph dream is pretty awesome too. What isn't so good is the music. Apart from the first song and the last (female duet) the ones in the middle are all various degrees of mediocre - especially when characters just sing in their heads instead of out loud.

Scoring time! While both movies had their own faults I did quite enjoy them equally so they both get two and a half plagues out of five from me. Which one would I want to watch again? Prince of Egypt, purely because I quite like the animation.