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SHEPPARD’S
VIDEO-GAME PIE
By Stephen Lea Sheppard
Photo by Dan Siney
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DAWN OF DISCOVERY
Platform: Nintendo DS
Publisher: Ubisoft
Most people are familiar with
SimCity, and anyone who’s been playing PC games for a few years is bound to have heard of Sid Meyer’s
Civilization.
Dawn of Discovery, also known as
Anno 1404 in non-North American venues, is a cross between those two games, set in a heavily fictionalized Age of Discovery. There are a couple of versions of this game, some more serious than others, but the one I have, the one on the Nintendo DS, is light in tone—generic European kingdom is suffering from a famine, so generic European king sends his two sons to colonize the many islands in the kingdom’s waters, develop them, and start shipping food and resources back home. One son is a warmongering fuckup, and the other is a peace-loving… whatever the opposite of a fuckup is; of course you play the latter and the former constantly causes problems for you while you try to develop peaceful relations with the generic Arabian civilization you bump into along the way.
The story doesn’t actually matter. The game is about building little developed nations on little islands, managing little economies, and (eventually) fielding little military units to defend yourself from pirates and other nations. There’s a campaign mode, with an actual plot and characters and scenarios with goals and things, and a freeform mode, where you’re just put on a map and given a bunch of islands and some rivals to out-develop. Like
SimCity and
Civilization,
Dawn of Discovery is
addictive as hell. I lost hours to this fucker. I have to commend them; the campaign mode is a great introduction to the mechanics of the game. The only time I felt overwhelmed was when they decided to introduce ship-sinking pirates about three levels before they introduced any player-controlled military—I got really tired of my settler ships being sunk on the way to new islands with no recourse but frantic dodging. Later on this got a lot easier when I could just make troop ships to sink them instead. If you’re in the market for something like
Civ but in real-time, you could do a lot worse than
Dawn of Discovery.
See all articles by this contributor
Anonymous, on Oct 6, 2009 wrote:
holy shit i just realized you were on freaks and geeks |
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| Stephen Lea Sheppard, on Oct 4, 2009 wrote:
God damn it!
*sigh*
Sorry, my bad. Indeed, Capcom shouldn’t be credited for Symphony of the Night. Apologies, everyone. |
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Anonymous, on Oct 3, 2009 wrote:
yo. konami makes castlevania, but i’m sure you knew that! aside from that, another excellent addition to the pie. |
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