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Fall of Rome

	Author: Will Trotter Article Type: PC Game Review Publication Date: 11/23/2005 Developer: Enlightened Age Entertainment Publisher: Enlightened Age Entertainment Related Categories: Great Civilizations / Ancients, Ground Combat, Turn-based, Europe

TO EVERY RULE, AN EXCEPTION

Readers who’ve followed my work for a long time have no doubt noticed a few of my salient prejudices. Perhaps the most glaring (and surely the most tiresomely repeated) is my aversion to on-line multi-player games. I just don’t like them, Sam I-AM!

“And why is that. Math-ter Bill”, asks Skippy, the twisted, malodorous homunculus who’s been assigned as my apprentice/intern?

I respond to his nettlesome sneers with the grace and courtesy for which I am famous: “You’ve observed my eccentricities at close range for some time now, so you should be able to answer your own question without missing a beat. That’s right – pick up the chalk and write ‘em out on the nice clean blackboard:”

(Squeaking-chalk noises cause cat to foam at the mouth and claw his way through a window screen; the fillings in my molars begin to soften, but Skippy does a thorough job, for an unpaid intern Apprentice Game Journalist, that is. I have trained him well, the ferret-faced little bugger):

REESUNS WHY MYSTR BILL HATES ON-LINE GAMEZ:
1. LYFE’S 2 SHORT
2. HATES UTHER PEOPLE
3. SULLEN MOOD ALL THE TIME (MYSANTHROPE – GETS WORSE WITH AGE)

(I cuff him smartly across the chops and peel the chalk from his snot-encrusted fingers, breaking one or two in the process. Sniveling and drooling, he crawls away to sulk on his straw pallet and stick pins in that wax doll he’s made with my toenail clippings and flakes from a rancid old cigar butt he snatched from my ashtray. Do your worst, ungrateful little weasel; don’t you know that all veteran game reviewers are masters at disarming crude voodoo curses? That’s how we live long enough to become “veteran game reviewers”!)

I’ll translate those scrawls for you, dear reader. And I don’t “hate” on-line games – one cannot “hate” an inanimate concept. But one can choose to ignore it, even if by doing so, one runs the risk of being labeled a reactionary, anti-social, Luddite. But a quick browse through my archival Record of Publications reveals that I’d actually spent quite a bit more time exploring the on-line realms than I remembered. Especially after 1998, when I was relieved of seniority, perks, and a $37K a year salary by the new owners of P.C. Gamer and reduced to groveling for any freelance crumb my masters felt like tossing my way, regardless of genre or any other personal preferences. A fee is a fee, especially when one has to juggle five or six reviewing assignments per month just to break even. On-line multi-player games were the hottest thing in the industry, and since most reviewers found writing about them onerous in the extreme, that was the place to pick up a quick nickel-and-dime gig.

I always ventured on-line heavily disguised (game administrators were sworn to secrecy about my presence in their realms and as far as I know, no one ever violated that confidence), striving for anonymity by crouching behind the flattest, most unremarkable game-name I could think of. Why all this subterfuge? Think about it, folks. If the rumor blazed through an on-line “community” that PC Gamer’s Senior Writer was traveling the land incognito every V.R. gunslinger with a grudge against print magazines (or game reviewers in general), would mobilize in murderous competition for the “honor” of cutting off Bill Trotter’s head in a dark alley behind one of those forlorn little taverns timid newbies hung out during the long and dangerous nights, in the Province of Menial Tasks. What a notch to carve on your sword-pommel! What a bonanza of bragging rights! (What a dismal humiliation to see one’s virtual head decorating the virtual pike of some dysfunctional zit-daubed teenager living in Cow Pie, Wisconsin!)

The enforced anonymity didn’t bother me because, truth to tell, I really sucked at the big-scale RPGs; whatever progress I made was usually assisted by the liberal and shameless use of the cheat codes I’d been able to wrest from the game-developers. Mind you, I didn’t short-change those assignments – I put in enough hours to write a knowledgeable review; but I rarely lingered for one turn longer than necessary to do an adequate job. Since the basic features of so many on-line RPGs were close to identical, the taking of short-cuts seldom made much difference in the accuracy of my critique; an orc is an orc is an orc; slay one, you’ve slain a million of ‘em.

So from my first hesitant, brave-new-world plunge into Ultima On-Line down to the latest exhilarating but quickly exhausting slaughter-fest of a shooter, my basic discontents with the multi-player genre have remained the same:

“Hell is other people”
-- Jean Paul Sartre

In the aggregate, I bore no ill will towards that multitude of on-line players who claim their chosen virtual reality to be a hypnotically beautiful, marvelously intricate world, populated with colorful characters and offering exciting opportunities to visit exotic, alien cultures and exterminate them. To succeed in such a perilous, highly competitive world requires dedication, persistence, resiliency of character, and above all, oodles of free time; it is no casual undertaking. If you are by nature a cautious, undemonstrative person, you won’t even attempt a beginning-level quest until you’ve acquired the sort of arms, armor, and Cub Scout Spell Book that might allow you to prevail against an attack by a horde of phobic goldfish, never mind anything truly menacing. In some of the huge, long-established MMORPGs, you may end up investing almost as many man-hours in menial sanitation work or repetitive rodent-hacking as you would undergoing basic training in one of the Real World’s armed forces. But at least the government pays you to endure basic training, whilst in your chosen virtual world, you’re the one shelling out a monthly service charge for the privilege of performing several weeks’ worth of entry-level scut-work not noticeably more entertaining than its real-life, minimum-wage counterpart.