With the approach of the Chinese New Year and the winter vacation, Taiwan's PC games industry must gear up for its first battle of 2002. An estimated 30 new games will hit the shelves this season, promising huge improvements and placing almost overwhelming demands on your computer system. With Sid Meier's now classic Civilization going into its third edition and Rick Goodman bringing out Empire Earth, whatever you've got, it probably isn't enough. But for avid gamers, the bigger, better and more realistic options to old favorites will probably be just too good to miss out on.
Looking at recently released and soon to be released games, there is little change in concept this season. It's more a case of the technical upgrading of old ideas. But this in no way diminishes the excitement at the release of Civilization III by Sierra and the new Empire Earth, put together by the same team that brought out Age of Empire and Age of Kingdom. Four years in the making, Empire Earth has been highly praised by PC Gamer magazine, for combining the epic scope of Civilization with the real-time strategy format of Age of Empire.
But this comes at a price. To get the best of the 3D effects, and the games' ability to marshal thousands of units on the battlefield, gamers are going to need top-of-the-line equipment and the patience to work through an instruction manual 230 pages long.
"[With all the effects turned on], even a computer with a 1.2GHz CPU, an advanced chip video card and 256MB of RAM experienced lag time during tests," said Chen Chih-hao (
But the scope of Empire Earth, with its time span of 500,000 years, goes far beyond anything previously achieved in the real-time strategy format. Given the diverse cultural and technological levels encompassed in the game, military units have been calibrated to reflect different levels of technological capability.
"For example, units such as aircraft carriers or nuclear armed bombers can make a decisive difference in the game," Chen said, "and at other stages of development, a machine gun or canon will decide a battle. You will no longer have ludicrous situations where spearmen are able to overpower a tank [as could happen in earlier versions.]"
The battle behind the scenes of Empire Earth was almost as dramatic as anything the game has to offer.
In the second half of 2000, Unalis, which has distributed previous Sierra games, was faced with a strong bid from Chinasoft Group for the distribution rights to Empire Earth. In fact, at the Taiwan International Computer Show in December of the same year, Chinasoft was already promoting the game and demo versions were already released. At the time, Unalis vice president Wu Shoou (
At the computer show last August, Chinasoft was still promoting the game through its magazine and Internet cafes, but by December the tables had turned, and Unalis announced at a press conference, at which representatives from Sierra were present, that it would be the official distributor of the game. According to a member of Unalis' distribution department who wished to remain anonymous, this was because Unalis had simply changed the rules. Instead of bidding for distribution rights, it guaranteed Sierra sales by buying the games outright. "The sale of the English versions has already reached target, and of the 70,000 Chinese-language sets, we will sell them by March or April," he told Taipei Times.
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