Nostalgic Game Review
Welcome back to a new episode of the Nostalgic Game Review, where each month I will bring up an old game I played long ago for nostalgic reasons but also to reflect on how technologies evolved in games (and appreciate our present era even more! :D)
As the first episode for Nostalgic Game Review being a standalone column, I would share something silly and personal. I originally researched and prepared to write about a completely different game, an attack helicopter simulator game I played long ago. It was going to be this Comanche game, as all the images and even the demo seems to reflect my experience for the game. Turns out the one I played was the 1996 Jane’s AH-64D Apache Longbow and I was just being very confused :D. We will get back to talk about that game at a later time. But I just couldn’t forgive myself for mixing up “Apache” with “Comanche”. Terribly Sorry, helicopters!
So let’s dive into this awesome 1991 game made in Taiwan:
The Rising Dynasty(三國演義)
What is it?
This is a strategy game that’s very similar to the famous series made by KOEI, closely based on the famous Chinese historical novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”.
The player can either become one of the historical leaders or create a brand new fictional character, and battle through the Eastern Han dynasty / 3 kingdoms era (begins in 189AD) in an attempt to unify the whole world (of the known China).
Pretty standard to this game genre, player get to manage resources including the territories, gold, food supplies, talents (various types of advisors, generals roles), and even some special treasures (special swords, particular type of horse, strategy books e.g. The Art of War). Obviously the goal is to manage the territory to produce more resources so everyone lives happily, and attract more talents, and then [optionally] create strategic alliances to (jointly) concur the others and expand the territory.
The level of details is just deep enough to be fun without becoming a chore. Each character has attributes like strength, intelligence, charisma, etc that influence the outcome of actions performed. The character also ages with the in-game time, the strength weakens and eventually the character may die at a certain point. Each ‘province’ has attributes like soil value, chance of flooding, farm stock resale value, etc, that influence your grains income, and frequency of natural disasters.
Battles are turn-based tactical style and things are always different depending on which province your battle is happening at. This allows different strategies of battle, e.g. if you are near upstream of a river and enemies are camping downstream, you can essentially poison their water source and weaken the enemy by a number.
The goal of the game (all ‘province’ are in your territory’s color):
And you get to sit on a very special seat 😉
Spoiler alert for the history buffs. None of the three kingdoms unified ‘the world’ (known China). It was this dude:
What’s in it?
Remember 5 1/4″ floppy disks?
There’s also a very helpful manual with nice artworks.
My impression
A lot of time sunk into this game. Not just because it is easy to play, and a lot of historical moments to experience, the game also innovated by providing realistic speech dialog according to the situations. E.g. when somebody challenges you to battle, your character’s image will show up with an angry dialog, or taunting the opponent with political rebuttal. The verbal exchanges were very well done and were in the verbage directly taken from the novel. So it feels very realistic as if you have travelled back in time to interact with the famous people.
Because of this game, I got very intrigued and went on to read through the novel. Later on, it also definitely helped me learn the actual history in an invaluable way. One would only wish more games can be produced like this to help smooth out the learning experience.
Here is a youtube video with the game in action:
That’s it for this episode of Nostalgic Game Review! Thank you for reading and I appreciate any comments/feedback or if there’s a game you would like me to review 🙂