Mega lo Mania

The Good
Mega lo Mania is a gem of a game. It was created by Sensible Software, who were well known at the time for their superior quality games. Above all, their games were always designed with the objective that they would be fun to play.

This game is of an early breed of real-time strategy games then popularly referred to as God Games. And it's an excellent one at that. There is never a problem with too much micromanagement, as becomes a problem so often with the genre. The game mechanics are elegant and simple, never bogging you down, never overwhelming.

Mega lo Mania is all about allocating resources efficiently. You constantly find yourself having to balance expansion vs. advancement. A bigger army vs. a more advanced army. Add to that the fact that you need to allocate people to mining resources to build your vast army, since more advanced equipment costs more resources.

The graphics are simple, colorful, and cartoony. The interface is also very simple and intuitive. After you've played one map you've already mastered the interface. You don't have to click individual soldiers, and there are no annoying AI problems with your minions. It's easy enough for a child to pick up, but challenging enough for anyone. And it doesn't take an expert mouser to become good at it (unlike C&C and the like, where life or death depends on the speed of your mouse).

The game avoids becoming repetitive by allowing you to advance a little further technologically on each map. On the first map you only get slingshots and spears, but as the game progresses you get more and more high-tech toys to play with. There's also a speed setting so you can fast forward over the boring bits and slow down when things get really hectic.

In fact, Mega lo Mania is quite the opposite of boring. It's one of the most intensely addictive games I have ever played.

The Bad
There's really not much to dislike here. The graphics and interface sometimes feel a little lacking. The interface is all icons and it's not always immediately obvious how to get from one part to the other. Luckily, the interface is very simple, so there's not much to get lost in.

Also, it can be extremely frustrating when you're almost through to completing a level and the opposition just seems to gang up on you. Make no mistake, the latter levels of this game are very difficult, but you only ever have to start over at the beginning of the current island. It never gets so frustrating that you don't want to give it just one more go.

The only other complaint I have is that Mega lo Mania ruined for me the genre of real-time strategy forever. I could never get into Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Warcraft and the like, because I would always think "Mega lo Mania was so much more fun than this".

The Bottom Line
Sensible Software's Mega lo Mania followed in the wake of a slew of God Games in the late 80's and early 90's. It was Sensible's first and only attempt at such a game, and in my opinion it's the best game they ever made.

It's really very difficult to describe this game, although the concept is beutifully simple. At heart, Mega lo Mania is a real-time strategy game. But you have to remember this was before there was Dune 2, before there was Command & Conquer, Warcraft, etc. So it doesn't really play like other real-time strategy games. This is a good thing.

You start out by selecting one of 4 pre-created characters who will become the leader of your people. The game is centered around a series of islands, each of which you must conquer by becoming the only tribe on the island.

The island maps are divided into squares, each one with its own set of resources. When you start an island, each player selects one square to build his home tower. The people you sent will be contained within the tower and you can allocate jobs to each of them. Your people can mine resources, defend the tower, and most importantly, research new technologies. You start with no technology whatsoever, your tower is a straw hut and your people must defend it with their bare hands. When you allocate people to research, you can invent sticks and stones as weapons, and better materials to build your tower. When you finish researching 3 technologies, you advance a tech level. Your tower becomes a clay structure and your people fight with spears and slingshots, then pikes and bows, and eventually stealth bombers and nuclear weapons.

People in the tower who are not assigned a task will breed to create more people. When you have enough people, you can create an army. Arm them with the weapons of your choice, for which you will pay with resources like "moonlite" and "solarium", and deploy your army. You can move the army into an adjacent square to start a new tower, or to destroy your enemies' towers.

With each new tower you build, the resources available will be different, so you must "reinvent the wheel", literally, each time you start a new tower. Two towers build armies faster than one, but new technology is researched faster with more people at your most advanced tower, so the game becomes an issue of allocating your resources wisely and expanding at just the right time. Eventually, if all goes well, you will have a vast army of cave men, knights, catapults and ballistic missiles with which to bring the opposition to its knees and conquer the whole island.