License:Freeware (Free) File Size:19.98 Mb. Runs on: WinXP, WinVista, Win7 x32, Win7 x64, Win2000. The Great Pharaoh v.1.0. Restore the grandeur of ancient Egyptian temples in The Great Pharaoh, a fast-paced matching challenge.Legend says that in the abandoned temples of the City of the Dead, the treasury of Egypt's ancient rulers is kept hidden. Pharaoh Cleopatra is a real-time strategy video game.Immerse yourself in Ancient Egypt from the age of the great pyramids to the final years of the New Kingdom. Govern all aspects of the exotic Egyptian, culture from religion to trading with distant cities.

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It came, it saw, and it conquered. Caesar III, last year's Rome 'em-up, proved to be one of the most addictive games of all time. Not content with replicating life in Roman times, the Impressions team has shifted their focus towards Egypt, land of sun, sand, slave labour and elaborate monuments. Despite the change of scenario, Pharaoh uses the same engine as its predecessor, a fact that has led cynics to label it 'Caesar 3 with pyramids'.

There's no denying that the basic gameplay elements are the same, and for those who missed out last time round, they go a little bit like this: faced with little more than a barren wasteland, you have to build a city from the ground up, populate it, and provide a decent standard of living for your citizens, who will demand food, jobs, education, entertainment, protection, and all the beer they can drink. Religion also plays a major role, and various gods must be appeased through building temples and holding festivals, with failure to please them resulting in a blight upon your land.

So far, so Sim Ancient. You start by laying a couple of plots of land, some proles move in and construct rudimentary shacks, and you give them a water supply so they can wash their arses. A lack of fast food establishments is evident so you build a hunting lodge, enabling them to slaughter ostriches, apparently the equivalent of KFC in Egyptian times. Food is stored in granaries and distributed among the masses via a series of bazaars. Ostrich with a side dish of ostrich isn't the most balanced of diets, though, and farming a variety of foodstuffs is key here. Farms can mainly be built in the flood plain of the Nile, and this is where Pharaoh differs from Caesar, as farms are underwater for a sizeable part of the year. This means that enough food has to be stored to feed the populace for the remainder of the year -although, as a back-up, parts of the mainland can be irrigated with ditches.

It S Just Gone Noon...

The flooding has a further knock-on effect, though, in that it leaves thousands of burly farmers with time on their hands. You don't want them worrying the livestock, and with no income support process in place, you need to find work for idle farmhands to do.

Job creation Egyptian-style is a world away from today's Restart schemes, though, and involves constructing vast monuments that will last for thousands of years. We're talking pyramids, naturally, not to mention the odd sphinx, or even a mastaba, whatever that is. The pyramids come in three sizes and even the smallest takes an absolute age to build. One of the good things about Caesar III was the fact that buildings could be constructed immediately, and this is still largely the case in Pharaoh, except in the case of the major monuments. A sphinx has to be hewn from a rough chunk of rock, whereas pyramids have to be meticulously constructed block by block. It's an arduous process, and one that is exacerbated by the fact that just as you're making progress, your workers down tools and go back to the more leisurely pursuit of farming. And when you finally do finish a pyramid, you then have to fill it with trinkets to accompany the deceased on his journey into the afterlife. Tomb Filler, if you like.

Half-Past Monsoon...

Other than that, it's business as usual. What begins as a couple of squalid homesteads soon grows into a vast, sprawling city as your life ticks by. It's certainly compulsive, although whether it's actually fun is a different matter, but the same argument can be levelled at many games.

There is definitely some satisfaction to be gleaned from overcoming problems, although this is inevitably tempered by feelings of self loathing at having wasted hours of your life doing so. If you consider your time spent on earth as a life sentence, then this is one way of getting through chunks of it. That said, it's quite possible to leave the game running for a while and go about your business.

Other tweaks from Caesar III include the introduction of roadblocks, which restrict fire officers and so forth to a certain area. This prevents key workers from wandering around aimlessly while the city crumbles, which was one of the criticisms levelled at Caesar III. It does work in the short term, although once the city reaches a certain size it becomes largely impossible to keep track of things.

On The Banks Of The River Nile...

A further criticism of the Caesar III engine was the jerky scrolling. Sadly, this is still the case and over the course of a six-hour session it genuinely starts to wreak havoc with your eyes, leaving you with the slightly disconcerting feeling that your head is caving in from the inside. If you can take the physical debilitation and the grossly antisocial aspect, though, there is certainly value for money in Pharaoh. That said, if you've never played Caesar III, you might as well just try to get that cheap. Roman times somehow seem more fitting, probably because the Egyptians never quite got round to invading Britain. With the whole flooding and monument issue to consider, it could be argued that Pharaoh is the more advanced game, although it could just as viably be argued that it's a pain in the arse.

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Pharaoh is definitely a commitment, and sometimes you think you might be better off having a quick blast of FIFA and then going down the boozer for a skinful and a fight. But it must have something going for it to keep you transfixed for more time than is healthy, and if you fancy staying in, this will ensure that you do. Which is no bad thing because, as everyone knows, there are people out there who can hurt you.