I stubbornly refuse to let some of my childhood favourites fade into oblivion. Even if I have to dust off an old retro console or suffer through a 4:3 aspect ratio on my PC monitor, I'll still boot them up occasionally. If we're lucky, we'll get a remake, remaster, or port, and it's not until you have a proper comparison sometimes that you realise just how much games have aged.
After playing the Monster Rancher Nintendo Switch port, I don't think I could ever go back to playing my grainy, laggy, PS1 copy, even if I miss the novelty of swapping CDs. Earlier this year, Pharaoh: A New Era reminded me that nostalgia can serve as rose-tinted glasses, as the remake showed how much the original had aged when it came to both graphics and gameplay.
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It felt like a gift to have new life breathed into one of my favourite series and be given the chance to replay a classic with all the modern bells and whistles we've grown accustomed to, but the real gift was yet to come. While taking a trip down memory lane and gushing to TheGamer team about how Zeus: Master of Olympus was the top-tier pick when it came to Sierra's City Building series, I discovered there had been another entry in the series that I had never known about - Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom.
This wasn't an easily overlooked mediocre title among the many other games I already knew about. I played all the iterations of Caesar through to Zeus, I'm no casual fan, and yet Emperor was the final game to be completed in the series. How did I miss this swansong for over 20 years?
Part of the reason I hold Zeus in such high regard was that it was - to my knowledge - the latest game in the series, and so it benefitted from all the best mechanics and elements that Sierra had refined over the years. It had the global labour pool, the world map where you could interact with other cities, invade them, or send them gifts. The gods would visit and walk around the city, and there was more variety when it came to building and managing your city.
As soon as I realised Emperor existed, I purchased and installed it as if I'd pre-ordered a new release and it had arrived early. Had I missed out on a gem for 21 years, or would I be able to tell myself it didn't matter as it wasn't that great after all? I got my answer pretty quickly - Emperor is the best game in the entire series and I was a fool for not knowing about it sooner.
It takes everything good about its predecessors and adds new mechanics and flair, such as taking Zeus's god feature but repackaging them as ancestors. Most importantly, for me, it brought new challenges. I've rinsed the older games inside and out by this point, there is no challenge there for me anymore, but Emperor tested my skill and patience in more ways than one, in a good way.
It does this by evolving core mechanics into something more complex. For example, now you don't just have to worry about how to source food for your people and ensure they can access it, as you also have to concentrate on food quality. There are also some very welcome refinements, like residential walls. These are advanced roadblocks essentially, which let you pick and choose which kind of walkers can pass through to help make your city layout even more efficient. Emperor doesn't break any new ground in a way that redefines the series or genre, but that suits me just fine. It's more of what I love, with enough new tweaks to keep things interesting.
I'm still weighing up whether the joy of discovering this now outweighs the fact I could have been playing it all this time if I wasn't so scatterbrained. I missed out on the multiplayer, which is now dead in the water. But what can you expect from a game that came out in 2002? If you'd told me I'd be dedicating so much of my time in 2023 to a game over two decades old, I wouldn't have believed you. Yet here I am. Now, please excuse me. I have an empire to run.
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