Have You Played... Mega Lo Mania?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

When I first laid eyes or hands on Populous, the famous god game, I had one thought: "Oh, it's like Mega Lo Mania but boring." Sensible Software's strategy-god game, with its angry, competing tribes, seemed much more exciting to my young mind.

To my now adult mind, too. Instead of raising and lowering terrain, Mega Lo Mania has you assigning your population to different disciplines: research, attack, defence, breeding and mining. More people assigned to one area causes progress in that area to speed up, which is important because i) your civilization advances through the ages, just like in Civilization and ii) there are other rival factions out there, and it'd be a shame if they turned up to your castle with better weapons than you had.

Like all the Amiga games I played, I was never great at MLM. I'm not sure I ever understood the above described systems when I played. I knew enough to develop my people and my castle a bit however, so that I could place them in the parapets and have them rain arrows on opportunistic enemies below. I found this extremely satisfying - and it was probably the first real-time strategy game I ever made any headway with.