I'm sure quite a few of you played this one in one of it's iterations. I found this game when it was still Caesar II - and loved it. I played the game's sequels, too. The third in the series is widely recognized as being better than the fourth, but the fourth was easier to capture, so I took the easy way out.
Caesar was one of four games in the Sierra city-building series, which has been a staple of my gaming history. (Spoiler: the others - Zeus, Emperor, and Pharaoh, are included in my list elsewhere...) Caesar holds the distinction of being the first game that came out in the series, and also of being my least favorite. Again, if you're going to play it, I suggest playing either Caesar 3 or going way back to Caesar 2. Caesar 4 really isn't all that good.
The original Caesar came out in 1992, and was similar to SimCity. The notable difference is that in Caesar, you needed to pay attention to military matters, as well as just economic. Over the years, there were three direct sequels to the game in Caesar 2 in 1995, 3 in 1998, and 4 in 2006 - as well as three spin-offs (mentioned by name above) that became known as Sierra's "City Building Series". In other words, Caesar was wildly successful. (At least, up until the last one of the series..) Despite the poor final game, the series as a whole will go down in history as helping to spawn an entire genre of games, and the earlier iterations are still listed amongst the best games of all time by some reviews.
As I said, Caesar 4 wasn't the best choice to stream, I should have done the extra work to stream 3 instead.... but for a Sunday bonus stream, it seemed silly. Caesar 4's faults lay with trying to go 3D, having 45 degree angle placement, frequent crashes on most systems, poor user interface, and above all, badly designed scenarios and too-small city areas. I still had a good time playing it, but I know I would have had more fun with 3. Lesson learned, I suppose.
This video holds the distinction of being my first twitch-muted VOD. I will attempt to upload the non-muted recorded version to youtube, but I am not holding my breath that it won't get muted. (In other words, this may just have to disappear into the ether of history.) I did have a good time with it, however - despite the glitchy placement and badly designed scenarios that made it nearly impossible to win. (In other words, I had to restart at least twice.. and I ended on yet another failure.) I didn't even manage to finish the tutorial campaign, because the last one didn't have a single place on the map to place a trade port, so there was no way to make money, and we went bankrupt. That being said, I still highly recommend Caesar 3... and even 2, if you can get it to run on modern systems. Just avoid 4, in my opinion. It wasn't worth the easier capturing.
(Youtube link will be published later - provided I can get past the muting for the music.... *roll eyes*)
