Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sea-trading city-builder Anno 1404 (or Dawn Of Discovery in North America) has sailed into our critical harbour to unload large bales of real-time medieval economics. Will it attract gaming patricians? Or could it simply be a peasant’s hovel furnished with old-school resource management? Here’s Wot I Think.
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So, I’ve been sitting and reviewing Anno all day on the Wii, where I found myself unfeasibly amused by being repeatedly told to pay the herb tribute to the king, which sounds like some fascinating kind of drug-dealing slang. I come upstairs and find that the big-boy pants version of Anno 1404 (aka Dawn of Discovery in the US) has just released its demo. It’s time limited, allowing you an hour of play in each of the demo’s two modes, which still leaves a lot of time for city building, trading and herb-tributing. Jim did a mass post with all the videos on recently, but I think you’ll find one beneath the cut which he didn’t include. Or I could be wrong. You tell me, Anno 1404 fans.
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I just realised that we’ve barely paid any attention to Dawn Of Discovery, which is the historical city-forging management sequel ANNO 1404 for us Europeans. Presumably Americans need something that ties into the whole colonial history/discover of America thing to make sense of it, eh? [This bit is where I am poking fun at pointless rebranding exercises, HAHA.] Whatever the naming foolery, it’s looking rather splendid, with some remarkably intricate city-building going on. The core campaign of the game is based around interaction with Eastern cultures, including what is apparently fairly complex trade and diplomacy, as you settle a chain of islands. What looks most satisfying is the visual wealth of the cities themselves: I can easily imagining sinking weeks into creating the bustling little economies. That should be made easier by the game apparently being a bit more sandboxy than the previous ANNO titles.

No US release date yet, but it should be out by the end of the month in Europe. Check out the four videos below for a mildly amusing juxtaposition of smooth-voiced American narrator, and the German developers.

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Annoyingly we’re not at this year’s Leipzig Games Convention, because we’re a) stupid b) poor c) lazy and d) unfit for public consumption. We did intend to be, but things fall apart, the centre of PC game blogging cannot hold.

But let’s pretend. Imagine we are actually there, and the list of links below is actually stuff we’ve seen and written ourselves. It’ll be fun!
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