If you're a fan of the incredibly addictive Civilization strategy series and haven't bought Civilization IV yet, you can probably stop reading now to go buy the game. Civ IV makes plenty of great changes and additions to just about every aspect of the hazardously habit-forming strategy blueprint that famed designer Sid Meier and his talented team have made famous the world over, from combat to diplomacy to research to production to winning the space race. And just like with previous games in the series, Civ IV's varied and addictive gameplay offers the same tantalizing siren's song that will tempt you to take "just one more turn." Fundamentally, this is a much-improved version of the same Civ games we've all been playing and desperately trying to put down for years. And that's far from a bad thing. In fact, it's an awesome thing.

If you're familiar with the Civilization series, then you're already well aware that they've traditionally been turn-based strategy games that let you play as the political leader of one of the world's nations (such as Gandhi of India or Julius Caesar of Rome) in a fictitious bid to take over the globe, starting from the Stone Age and continuing right on through to the Space Age by having a lone settler unit build your first city on the way to establishing whatever advanced society you choose to design over the course of dozens of turns. The series gives you plenty of ways to do this, such as conquering your neighbors, researching advanced technology, or, in Civilization III (and IV), creating the most cultured society on the planet. It's this great variety that helps give Civ IV the same alarmingly addictive quality its predecessors carried. And thanks to its many improvements, major and minor, and its greater emphasis on strategy over bean-counting, Civ IV isn't just as good as Civ has ever been...it's better.

Like in previous games, your political leader has two special traits that will influence his or her reign, though all the game's traits are new, such as "organized," which cuts down on maintenance costs, or "expansive," which generates bonus health in cities and helps hasten growth and expansion. And Civilization IV fundamentally offers the same goals, but in a much more evolved, more strategic, and ultimately more rewarding manner. And each of these goals comes with many more options, which should open the game up to players with busy schedules...even if it may still seem overwhelming to beginners.

The Civ series' gameplay has several components, and almost every single one of them is improved in Civ IV. For instance, the series' combat system, which pits different military units against one another based on relative unit strength and technology, has been changed to a "strength" system that seems more intuitive. Units that are greatly advanced will have a clear advantage over more-primitive ones (to avoid the commonly cited, though rare, case of a tribal spearman defeating a tank in previous games), and military units in general have many different upgrades they can earn as they receive experience points and gain power levels. In addition, artillery has been tweaked to be much more useful. It can bombard targets, such as enemy cities, to lower defenses and to deal collateral damage to large "stacks" of armies. These improvements don't make battles all that much more complicated , but they do add more depth to combat, since both attackers and defenders have more factors to consider.

Civ IV has also improved on the way diplomacy works. While you can still make nice with your neighbors (and you can even win the game with a diplomatic victory condition), you have more options than just trading goods, cities, technologies, and/or relations. You can attempt to influence your neighbors to make war or peace with other neighbors, and you can even fence everyone out of your backyard using the game's new "open borders" system. In previous games, neighboring nations could send their city-building settlers and their soldiers wandering across your nation, free to declare war on your vulnerable home cities and worker civilians unless you complained strenuously (which sometimes caused them to declare war anyway). In Civ IV, the new border system means that no units from any other country can enter yours unless you have agreed to open borders with that particular country...or unless you're at war with that particular country. This is a godsend for defensive players who prefer to hang back to develop an economic, scientific, or cultural infrastructure without fear of ambush. However, even this new addition is balanced, since keeping your borders locked up tightly and never coming to your neighbors' aid doesn't make many friends. Other nations actually remember your actions and are poorly disposed if you refuse them too many favors.

You can make neighboring cities more apt to like you by adopting the same religion. One of Civ IV's brand-new features is the religion system, which is an intriguing addition, even if it isn't crucial to your success. The game's new religion system adds seven new creeds to the game, each of which is tied to a specific technology and each of which can influence your cities' culture-producing temple structures and missionaries. However, aside from the facts that some religions become available earlier in the game than others (since they're tied to earlier technologies) and that different religions lead to a different unique building (more on that later), all religions are pretty similar. Your overriding goal, should you choose to pursue a religious path, is to have all your cities--and your rival nations' cities--subscribe to the same faith: yours. Religious buildings also produce a bonus to culture, which is helpful if you're pursuing a strategy of rapid expansion (since cities with high culture automatically expand to take up more of the map, just like in Civ III) or of cultural victory. But there's no religion-based victory condition, and aside from these bonuses, religion isn't a hugely influential addition to the game. And it doesn't actually need to be a part of your strategy.

On the other hand, pursuing a strategy of cultural supremacy has been greatly improved in Civ IV. Nearly all cities generate a certain number of "culture points" by default each turn, so focusing heavily on cultural expansion by building culture-producing structures in your towns--such as religious temples--can hasten your expansion that much more quickly. If you focus specifically on developing your cities along a specific strategy, such as cultural advancement, they may produce a "great person," one of the game's all-new special units.

The new great people system is an interesting and useful addition that will probably be especially appreciated by experts. Great people can be expended in exchange for a number of powerful abilities. For instance, the culture-producing unit, the great artist, can be used to create an artistic masterpiece in a specific city, which drops a "culture bomb" that instantly generates thousands of culture points and greatly expands that city's borders. And depending on your strategy, as well as which technologies you've chosen to research, you'll also be able to create great military leaders, scientists, and religious prophets, who can all be used to create other powerful effects, like combining two or more great people to start a "golden age," in which your empire's production of units and structures is greatly increased. As it turns out, one of the game's all-new leader traits, "philosophical," increases your chances of producing a great person. So pursuing these powerful units seems like a viable strategy, though they don't seem overwhelmingly powerful, especially since they're extremely fragile and disappear whenever any of their abilities are used.

Civ IV makes a turn for the better by emphasizing strategic planning in general, which ultimately makes the game more balanced. For instance, worker units, which could previously only build a few improvements on land (such as roads, irrigation, and, later, railroad tracks), now have a huge number of appealing options to build, such as revenue-producing cottages, food-producing farms, animal-herding pastures, and many others. (And Civ IV's new interface lets you develop your cities without even opening the city menu.)

Also, just like in previous Civ games, you use each of your cities to produce units or structural improvements by expending production points over a series of turns. But unlike in previous games, if you change your project before it's done, you can't simply transfer those production points over to your new project. This old exploit, of building an expensive and time-consuming project (like a great wonder of the world) and then switching production at the last second by dumping the points into another project, is gone. And this is ultimately for the best, since you'll be making the decisions to invest in production before you start rather than halfway through. In addition, Civ IV has done away with Civ III's "industrious" leader trait, which sped production of all projects and was a bit too powerful in some cases. Every game of Civ IV has a much slower start, since all nations start off on even footing. But once they get started, every nation in the game has the ability to really get going quickly.

In response to fan requests to adjust the pace of the game, developer Firaxis has added three speeds: the surprisingly fast normal speed, the even-faster quick speed (in which you gain money, resources, and technology at a faster rate), and the slower-paced epic speed. While epic speed seems better suited to purists who prefer to take their time, the quick and the normal speed are conducive to much faster play. In fact, in quick speed it can actually take as little as an hour or two (or less) to take over the world. And even normal speed moves at a brisk pace.

In fact, once you get your production and research going in the right direction, several of the game's early epochs will pass you by in a blur, as you're constantly bombarded by alert messages that let you know your cities have built this or that project, that you've researched this or that technology, that you've recovered this or that tech from a nearby tribal village (more commonly known as a "goodie hut," which is a random spot on the map that can offer free bonuses), or that you've advanced to a certain epoch. As it turns out, different technologies aren't tied to specific epochs anymore, so you're free to pursue some technologies in advance of others. In fact, fans of the Civilization series' focus on world history may be somewhat disappointed that Civ IV no longer emphasizes the different eras, or dresses up its world leaders in different clothing as time goes by. However, even if the passage of time sometimes seems to have less structure and less individual character, you'll still be up well past your bedtime playing the game.

Even single-player and multiplayer options have been improved in Civ IV. The single-player game offers much-improved artificial intelligence that seems to cheat much less than in previous games, or not at all. In the single-player game, rival nations won't mysteriously explore the entire world in two turns, nor will they use those two turns to magically build a network of five cities where there were none before. Computer-controlled nations will also make much more reasonable bids at the table, but they can't be easily bribed with small handfuls of cash, either. The single-player difficulty seems to scale extremely well by offering a very gentle introduction for beginners at the lowest levels and a suitably tough challenge for experts at the highest levels.

Multiplayer also seems to work quite well, and thanks to the game's faster pace, it seems much, much more realistic to actually finish multiplayer games, especially on the "quick" speed setting. And as you might expect from any good turn-based game, Civ IV also supports play-by-e-mail and hotseat multiplayer, along with LAN and Internet play. The game even ships with additional custom scenarios and three fan-made modifications that offer new play modes. However, the ship date was moved up almost a full month, and presumably as a result, the game does feature a "worldbuilder" and scripting tools, but doesn't feature the "pit boss" persistent online multiplayer options or the software development kit that should have given it the tremendous value it otherwise would have had. Then again, considering all the different variables you can tweak, such as new landmass layouts and random leader behavior, plus all the different ways you can play multiplayer (to say nothing of the eventual new modifications the active fan community will undoubtedly create), Civ IV will keep you very busy for a long time. Here's a suggestion, though: Just make sure that long time doesn't take the form of consecutive nightly hours before a big day at work or school.

Civ IV clearly has a lot to offer fans of the series, despite a few minor issues that will be of most trouble to beginners, and even then, not by much. Like in Civ III before it, Civ IV just has a lot of concepts to learn for beginners. These concepts aren't always adequately explained by the in-game "civlopedia" reference, which, like Civ III's in-game reference, uses a Web-page-like hyperlink interface to jump to different topics. And like in the previous game's civlopedia, Civ IV's is occasionally convoluted and disorganized, alternately switching between an iconic interface and a text interface. The game ships with a playable tutorial narrated by Sid Meier himself, but the tutorial only covers about half the game's key concepts. In addition, the late game can still end up being rather messy, as you have dozens of worker units across your sprawling empire working on various improvements, even though you'll only want to focus on a few different major developments. Fortunately, Civ IV at least offers better automation options that help fight the clutter--and in some later games, you'll be much better able to focus only on a few improvements and automate everything else.

Civ IV also presents itself well with a distinctive title-screen track that recalls the music of Disney's The Lion King, as well as several other nation-specific songs that loop endlessly during gameplay, some of which are more memorable than others. The most intriguing aspect of Civ IV's audio is the narration you'll hear at the beginning of every new game and each time you research a new technology--narration that's provided by none other than Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame. Nimoy's scholarly delivery of his lines adds a touch of class to the game, though you may grow too familiar with them over time, since the same lines are repeated for the same techs. And despite the lengthy rendered animation that introduces the game the first time it's loaded, Mr. Nimoy's dulcet voice is unfortunately squandered at the beginning of each new game session, as his profound "In the beginning..." speech accompanies a disappointing series of concept art sketches. This intro is an homage to the first Civilization, but considering the animated opening sequence, an equally impressive animated sequence, or at least a cleaner-looking presentation of those images seems like it should've been used here.

The actual game itself looks considerably better, even though the interface can seem a bit rough at times (for instance, several menu icons, like the advisor menus and next-turn button, are extremely small and are best ignored in favor of keyboard shortcuts). But these minor concerns aren't concerns at all for experts (who will use keyboard shortcuts), and they give way to a colorful 3D graphics engine that lets you zoom in and out of your holdings. The graphics engine also furnishes beautifully animated, expressive portraits of each of the world's great leaders, from the ceremonious George Washington to the flirtatious Catherine the Great.

You don't have to be a history buff to enjoy Civilization IV, though that would help...and so would previous experience with other Civ games. Beginners will find Civ IV to be a complex strategy game with something of a learning curve, but with worthwhile rewards waiting for them once they start figuring things out. Experts will find Civ IV to be the proverbial better mousetrap: adjusted, tweaked, and sometimes completely changed. But it's still a Civ game, and with Civ IV, the series is even more engaging and addictive than ever. If you have even a passing interest in strategy games, world history, or getting less sleep at night, you owe it to yourself to give Civilization IV a try. And if you're already a fan of the series, then what are you waiting for? You should already be playing this game.

With Firaxis' superlative Civilization III, that old-school, up-till-5am-addictive, and one-more-turn-based grand-strategy gaming that was introduced 10 years ago in the original Civilization is back. And it's back with a vengeance. This sequel to one of the greatest games ever, which was itself the sequel to one of the greatest games ever, lives up to its lineage. It is a paean to the principles of solid design, sleek interface, sharp artwork, unlimited replayability, open architecture, and epic storytelling. It is yet another example of Sid Meier and company's cunning insight into what makes games good. Civilization III is, in short, a triumphant proclamation that strategy gaming is alive and well and still able to keep you rooted in front of your computer for hours at a time.

Civ is back--and better than ever.

There are two ways to look at Civilization III: either as it stands on its own, or as the most recent version in the evolution of a line of games stretching back to Sid Meier's original Civilization. As the latter, it's immediately clear that Civilization III's apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. In fact, you might even be disappointed when you start your first game of what feels like a warmed-over version of Civ II. But this feeling fades with time. The more you play, the more you'll realize that the new game's seemingly subtle changes have a significant impact.

Many of these changes are carried over from Firaxis' Alpha Centauri, which introduced concepts such as unique factions, national borders, and a living map. All of these are present in Civilization III, but it isn't just Alpha Centauri with a historical setting. Although the game's various civilizations aren't as distinct as Alpha Centauri's factions, they each have a unique unit and two "strengths" that give them special advantages. The unique units, which are really just souped-up versions of common units, are useful for only a limited time. For instance, everyone eventually gets jet fighters, but the Americans can build F-15s that hit a little harder. However, this doesn't come into play until late in the game, during the modern age. Similarly, the Romans' legionaries are slightly better than the commonly available swordsmen, but this isn't much help once history progresses into the middle ages. Unique units have their brief moments in the sun of time, providing their civilizations with a temporary military ace up the sleeve.

The civilization strengths, on the other hand, tweak the basic rules and have long-term implications for how you play the game. For instance, when you play as the Babylonians, who enjoy their strengths of being "scientific" and "religious," you pay half price for scientific and religious structures, you get a free technology every time you enter a new age, and you can instantly change governments without a period of anarchy. You might not appreciate the impact of these bonuses until you're playing a civilization that doesn't get them. Suddenly, important structures cost more, technology doesn't come as easily, and you're not as flexible when it comes to changing governments. With your choice of civilization, the dynamics of the game vary just enough to make you sit up and take notice.

The concepts of national borders and a living map have advanced significantly since Alpha Centauri. Each city accumulates culture depending on what you've built. A 3,000-year-old city with an ancient coliseum, cathedral, library, and university will have a whole heap of culture, whereas a new backwater village with a small temple will barely register. This is important because borders extend from cities based on how much culture they have. With enough culture pushing them out, your borders can swallow neighboring cities and bring them into your empire. Civilization III models the seductive power of entertainment, art, and religion. It's a form of conquest with sitcoms, music, and priests rather than soldiers, and it adds an important new dimension to the game.

The technology tree is more streamlined but still complex.

Another powerful and subtle difference is the role that the map plays in Civilization III. Terrain is no longer just a source of food, shields, and trade arrows. Rivers are a significant factor in combat and the development of cities, even well into the later game. Roads, railways, harbors, and airports connect your cities to each other and let you import goods from other civilizations. Cutting a certain stretch of road or blockading a particular harbor can plunge an entire civilization into panic or shut down the production of tanks, airplanes, and railroads. Because it's important to link to a certain resource, remote patches of land might take on new significance as the game progresses. The geopolitical shape of the world will shift as technology comes to rely on iron, then coal, then oil, then uranium. In Civ III, the map lives and breathes and drives the game. It's much more than simply a place to put your cities.

The computer's artificial intelligence is formidable, but it's not clear how much of this is due to "cheats," which are bonuses commonly given to make up for the fact that a computer AI can't see the big picture as well as a human can. Some suspicious things go on during the computer's turns. Units shuffle back and forth pointlessly as if they were patrolling. Twenty workers will march all at once to irrigate a single square. There'll be an awful lot of outdated troops loitering around the AI's empires as the 20th century rolls around. But on the whole, the computer is surprisingly capable of providing a smart and competent challenge. It seems to recognize the importance of strategic resources on the map. It will pillage important terrain improvements and attack in numbers, making good use of combined arms. In terms of diplomacy, the AI civilizations don't react as abruptly or unpredictably as they have in the earlier games. In fact, diplomacy in Civilization III is a slow, ponderous, and frail process. Two sides starting a war can drag their allies with them, and world peace can collapse like a house of cards. Civilization III features overnight cataclysms of World War I proportions.

In the evolution of strategy game design, Civilization III is clearly the best thing since Civilization II. If you've been playing these sorts of games all along, you're going to love it. And since it includes a comprehensive scenario editor, serious players are going to be cranking out mods and scenarios that give Civ III almost impossibly long legs. You'd be hard pressed to imagine a game with more replay value than this. There's no question that this a perfect holiday treat for longtime strategy gamers. But how will it play for the casual gamers who spell the difference between critical and commercial success?

Features like culture add significantly to the series' core gameplay.

On one hand, Civilization III is more streamlined than its predecessors. It still ramps up slowly, gradually introducing new game mechanics as you advance through time and technology. In fact, the technology tree has been pruned considerably. Research doesn't meander anymore. Instead, it passes through a series of choke points that determine which of the four ages your civilization is in. As time goes on, there's less disparity, and diversity, among each civilization's technology. The dilemma of science isn't so much which path to take--since there aren't many--but whether to linger in one age to explore all the optional dead ends or whether to make a beeline for the next age. Do you stick around the industrial age to discover amphibious assaults, paratroopers, helicopters, espionage, and communism? Or do you rush into modern times to get started on nuclear subs, space flight, and stealth bombers? The new pruned tech tree keeps science focused for new players while giving experienced strategy gamers enough choice to keep it interesting.

Things such as aircraft, trade, and espionage are also streamlined--unfortunately, espionage is so streamlined that it seems tacked on as a poorly documented afterthought. There's a new emphasis on gold, which has many more uses than it did in the previous games. The combat system is flexible and intuitive, presenting numerous options for combined arms without throwing a bunch of stats at the player. There are simple rules for complex ideas, such as defensive artillery fire, zones of control, retreats, air superiority, and unit experience. The interface keeps the map under your nose whenever possible. Overall, the game is easy to manage and full of Sid Meier's trademark cross-linked screens and clearly demonstrated relationships. There are very few "soft factors" running invisibly under the hood. This is a confident, competent, accessible design that presents almost no obstacles to new players. It's built to suck you in and teach you to play. In this regard, Civ III is perfect for casual and new players. It won't scare off people who might just be considering their first epic strategy game.

At least that's the way the first five or so hours are. Civilization III has done almost nothing to solve the problem of increasing complexity as the game goes on. The endgame bogs down in as deep a morass of micromanagement as ever. Civilizations sprawl and brim over with units. Managing your workers and terrain improvements can get complicated and tedious. Pollution is still an exercise in workers scuttling to and fro. City management and terrain improvement can be turned over to the computer, but you'll get weird situations like archers being built in A.D. 1600 and cityscapes speckled with too many mines. This is a problem with most games that model the epic sweep of history, so it's not unique to Civilization III. What is unique to Civilization III is the inordinate time between turns in the later game. On a midrange system, it's not unusual for the computer to take well more than a minute between turns. This will tax the patience of even serious gamers, so it's hard to imagine casual gamers putting up with it. To its credit, however, the new victory conditions in Civilization III mean you won't necessarily be shuffling units until the bitter end.

The graphics and artwork, which are charming and varied, should do a good job of hooking you in. The map looks great, striking the perfect balance between being zoomed in close enough to look attractive and being zoomed far out enough to be useful. Animated units fight battles and cheer when they win. Cities, citizens, and advisors are updated as a game progresses through the different ages. It's amusing to see an industrial age Cleopatra in a prairie bonnet or Shaka Zulu wearing a contemporary business suit. It's also gratifying to see your city grow into brick buildings and then skyscrapers.

Civilization III will appeal to fans and new players alike.

The manual is generally decent, but it leaves a lot of information to the online Civilopedia, which isn't consistently available. On the city list, the option to sort cities doesn't work. Also, Civ III doesn't offer any decent way to find specific resources, cities, or units. Looking for oil? Wondering where your elite riflemen went? Can't remember where the closest barracks is? Have fun hunting around. Also, as the game neared completion, Firaxis decided not to ship with multiplayer support. It has suggested that multiplayer features might be added later, but if you're looking for a multiplayer grand-strategy game, then Civilization III isn't the place to look for the time being.

It speaks volumes that the most significant complaints specific to Civilization III are minor interface issues. Civ III represents solid design coupled with careful execution at its level best. Between its streamlined gameplay and unparalleled pedigree, Civilization III can open strategy gaming to a wider audience and kick off the sort of renaissance that role-playing games enjoyed after the release of Baldur's Gate. We can only hope. And even if it doesn't, well...we'll always have Civilization III.

After the disappointing example set by X-COM 2, many gamers expected Civilization II to be nothing more than Sid Meier's original game with a few new graphics tacked on. Others were worried that the game's designers would stray too far from the path, and would ruin the spectacular play balance that made Civilization such a hit. In the end, the design team at Microprose managed to add a score of new play elements that help the aging strategy classic evolve - without sacrificing the game's addictive qualities.

Although players familiar with the original Civilization will probably be able to jump in and start playing right away, a swarm of new features definitely warrants a few minutes with the manual. What players will most likely notice first is the much greater number of races to choose from, including the Sioux, the Carthaginians, and the Chinese, as well as a customizing option that lets you create any personal favorites the designers may have missed. This time around, cultural variations are also represented onscreen by four different city growth patterns. The fantastic number of new combat units adds limitless possibilities, as players figure out new ways to use marines (who can attack from the sea), cruise missiles, paratroopers, and even religious fanatics to their best advantage. For those who grew tired of the chaotic battlegrounds of the original game (remember when that chariot took out your battleship?), there's a new warfare system that gives units a score in both firepower and hit points for more realistic combat results. All of these features combine to give the game a powerful depth, and enough variation to ensure that players will be loading this one up for months to come.

Plenty of little details in Civilization II are also worth noting: an improved graphics set featuring a three-quarters viewpoint similar to Syndicate or Crusader, entertaining sound effects that range from the trumpet of an elephant to the air raid sirens of an atomic attack, full-motion video clips for each of the civilization advances, and a full map editor that enables players to design their own fields of conquest. Although the game suffers from its lack of multiplayer options, there's really nothing available that can compete with its depth of play, subtlety of challenge, and pure addictive potential. The fact is, if you're a strategy fan, you've already bought this game, and if you're not, this title could turn you around.

Since Age of Empires debuted in 1997, the series has grown to become one of the pillars of real-time strategy gaming. Its success is in part due to the way the series has shifted historical periods. The first game covers antiquity, from the Stone Age to the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, Age of Empires II focuses on the medieval era. And 2005's Age of Empires III is about the era of European exploration and colonization. This brings us to Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties, the second expansion pack and the first game in the franchise not created by Ensemble Studios. Big Huge Games, creator of Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends, is responsible for The Asian Dynasties, and the company ably delivers a solid expansion.

The Chinese discover the New World in The Asian Dynasties. Yes, you read that right.

What the expansion brings to the table are three new Asian civilizations--Japan, China, and India--as well as three campaigns built around them. The Japanese campaign deals with the Warring States period of rival Shogun; the Chinese campaign actually covers a naval expedition to the New World; and the Indian campaign is about throwing off the oppressive yoke of the East India Trading Company. The campaigns have their twists and turns, with a fair amount of betrayal going on, though the characters are drawn in such obviously black-and-white textures that it's not too hard to see the plot developments coming. For instance, most of the bad guys in the game speak with haughty, arrogant voices, while the good guys tend to be humbler and wiser.

The heart of the expansion is the three Asian civilizations, and Big Huge has done a good job in making them feel distinct from those seen in Age of Empires III. The Japanese are built around extremely powerful infantry units like samurai, while the Chinese and Indians can easily bring sheer mass to a battle in the form of large armies. The various economies reflect historical trends; for example, the Chinese and Indians can quickly boost their populations, giving them hordes of villagers to gather resources. One of the most important new features is actually the reintroduction of wonders to the game. Wonders are notable structures from history, and they played a significant role in the first two Age of Empires games, only to disappear in Age of Empires III. They're back in The Asian Dynasties, and each Asian civ has five to choose from. The ones that you select can help define your play style; we like the Chinese wonder that grants transcendence, or the ability to heal all your units instantly. That's particularly useful if you like to go on the offensive. Other wonders can boost resource gathering, grant free armies, and so on. Wonders are also important because they're the only way the Asian civilizations can advance from one technological age to another.

At the same time, the core game remains relatively the same. It's all about getting a large number of villagers out there gathering the three primary resources (food, wood, and gold) that are needed to build all your buildings, recruit your units, research your upgrades, and then advance to the next technological age to repeat the process all over again. The home cities concept is still here; you can request reinforcements or supplies from your civilization's capital. You do this by using special cards that you unlock. There are cards that can send military units, villagers, and resources, for example. You can also build custom decks that are designed for various strategies, like an economic deck that gives you bonus powers that aid your economy. Another unique aspect of the Asian civs is that they can use many of these cards twice, which can really help ramp up the size of an army or economy quickly. Serious players will no doubt spend lots of time analyzing the possible unlocks and building customized decks for different play styles, though you don't need to expend that much effort if you're a casual player, as the default deck is good enough.

One new feature is the foreign consulate, which allows Asian civilizations to ally with a European power and purchase reinforcements using tribute, which is a fourth resource that's unique to Asian civs. Tribute is basically a tax on your economy, and you can increase your rate of tribute at the price of a slightly slower economy, but what it does is allow you to purchase rare and powerful European units. The sudden appearance of a European army or navy to the battle can turn the tide of battle. Since you need to have Age of Empires III to play The Asian Dynasties, you can pit European and Asian civilizations against one another in skirmish or multiplayer modes on a wide variety of maps. Want to have Chinese warriors in New England? Go for it. The sides seem relatively well balanced even though they differ in how they advance from age to age. The Europeans tend to have a technological advantage, though the Asian civs tend to have a numerical one.

The home city concept gets an Asian makeover.

The Asian Dynasties does add some visual pizzazz in the form of architecture; the majestic wonders and buildings pop out on the screen. There's also plenty of variety among the units, from Indian war elephants to Chinese steppe riders and Japanese samurai. The music also offers some appropriately cultural queues (though it reuses much of the existing Age of Empires III score).

Like The WarChiefs expansion from last year, The Asian Dynasties does a good job of introducing distinct new civilizations to Age of Empires III--only this time, instead of Native American tribes, there are three iconic Asian civilizations to play with now. There's a fair amount here to dig into if you're a serious Age of Empires fan or someone who likes Asian civilization.

It would be incorrect, but not entirely unreasonable, to claim that Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings and its isometric 2D playing field seem just like every other first-generation real-time strategy game ever made. Take away the historical context depicting a millennium of military progress since the Dark Ages, and you'd have a game in which you'd stockpile resources, grow your population, and augment your technology, all to amass an army with which to defeat your enemies as quickly as possible. But even as this model has remained historically relevant for as long as history has been documented, so too is it not liable to stop being the premise for computer games anytime soon. And if Age of Kings is any indication of how such real-time strategy games will continue to improve, then we couldn't be more fortunate.

Although Age of Kings runs at higher resolutions and looks cleaner and sharper than many of its similar predecessors, you'll find that there's nothing foreign about its appearance. Villagers, buildings, trees, the black fog of war, and everything else on the map will be immediately recognizable if you've played a real-time strategy game before. But even if you've played them all, you'll note several differences in Age of Kings' presentation that make it stand out against comparable games. For instance, all the buildings and units in Age of Kings are shown more or less to scale - town halls and castles nearly fill the screen and loom high above your people. There are four different styles of architecture in the game - Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Eastern and Western European - and although they appear identical in the Dark Ages, by the Imperial Age all four look entirely different and authentically beautiful. Unlike the architecture, your villagers and military units look the same no matter what civilization you choose. Fortunately, almost every one of them looks good, and there are plenty to choose from, such as swordsmen and archers on up to mounted knights and terrific war machines.

Age of Kings can look a little bland and washed out before you fill the screen with buildings and military units, but this same sparseness makes its interface clean and effective. The clearly depicted controls at the bottom of the screen and the familiar mouse functionality make this game very easy to pick up and play. Best of all are the descriptive floating help messages that thoroughly describe every unit and technology available, which you can toggle off once you begin to remember them. Your units move quickly and easily from point to point, and selecting a mixed group will automatically assign them to a logical formation, with tougher units in front and more vulnerable units in pursuit. Grouped units will also travel at the rate of the slowest member of the brigade, a feature that ultimately lets you coordinate attacks far more effectively than in most any other real-time strategy game. And as your soldiers fight and win, they quickly seek out the closest and most appropriate target, thus eliminating any tedious micromanagement and affording you the time to oversee something more complicated and tactically viable than a head-on assault. With floating help turned on and all your little units running around at once, Age of Kings can start to look a little cluttered. But it also looks its best at times like this, when the screen is so full of buildings and people you can begin to imagine how their historical equivalents once prospered.

Even so, you'd think with only four styles of architecture and one generic set of units, the 13 civilizations in Age of Kings would seem identical. And while some of them seem similar, it's to the designers' great credit that most of the civilizations manage to feel very different from one another in spite of any visual likeness. For one thing, each civilization's units speak in their native language, and while they don't say too many different things, it's great to listen to them anyway. Each civilization also has its own unique unit that emphasizes or augments that civilization's strengths, and this also helps distinguish each one from the other 12. Every civilization also has its unique advantages that refer to the historical culture's strengths. For instance, to emphasize the Byzantines' defensive power, their units for countering infantry, archers, and cavalry are cheaper to produce; and to suggest the Turks' scientific achievements, they can research gunpowder technologies at a lower cost than any other civilization. Such cultural distinctions are often subtle but become more noticeable later in the game, when the skillful player who takes greater advantage of his culture's offensive or defensive inclinations will soon find himself in the lead.

Then again, to build up your civilization to its strongest potential is by no means a simple feat, despite whatever luxuries the game's elegant interface provides. The original Age of Empires was criticized for combining the pretensions of a complicated turn-based strategy game like Civilization with real-time gameplay mechanics that were borrowed from Warcraft II. But Age of Kings makes good on the original's promises by providing a huge, branching technology tree and a correspondingly profound depth of gameplay that rivals virtually all similarly themed turn-based games. You must constantly reevaluate your priorities when gathering the game's four resources, since those priorities change as new technologies become available; and you must constantly make key tactical decisions based on the order in which you research particular technologies. You need to keep moving forward without spreading yourself too thin, although you're afforded some breathing time to get started early on since you can garrison your villagers within your town hall to defend against a preemptive attack. And yet throughout the game, Age of Kings' pacing is so fast and so exciting as to rival Blizzard's real-time strategy hits. Consequently, under no circumstances should you be prepared to win a war in Age of Kings without a fast hand on the mouse. But similarly, you're not going to win unless you think.

Even Blizzard's Starcraft confines you to a basic set of strategies, whose subtle variations separate the experts from the rest. However, in Age of Kings, your options tend to be more flexible. If your opponent is too focused on particular tactics, you can easily allocate your resources into countering whatever it is he's sending your way. Swarms of infantry can be stopped cold by a simple wall; a contingent of archers may kill a line of cavalry but would be hard pressed to damage even a single war machine. Swordsmen can deal with pikemen easily, but the pikemen's reach make them much more effective against units on horseback. At one time, games aspired to such principles with the rock-scissors-paper game as a model. But Age of Kings has so many variants on this theme that to even suggest a similarity between Ensemble's sequel and the old betting game would be to grossly undermine Age of Kings' intricacy. It doesn't take long to realize that Age of Kings is complicated, but your appreciation for its detail will only grow with time as you begin to understand that, unlike in most real-time strategy games, you really do have several distinctly different but equally viable routes toward victory.

There are also several different ways to play the game. You can use the random map generator to quickly create a custom-tailored, finely crafted map for up to eight players, or build your own map from scratch. You'll find a consistent challenge in taking on one or several computer opponents set to the default difficulty or above, although you'll soon learn of the computer's propensity to use guerilla tactics and fall prey to particular tricks. You can start with a ton of resources and just have at it in the deathmatch mode; you can set out to kill the enemy king in a regicide match; and you can play one of Age of Kings' five historical campaigns. These campaigns focus on such legendary leaders as Joan of Arc, Frederick Barbarossa, and Genghis Khan in a series of linked missions interjected with voice-over narration describing these figures' tribulations and victories. All five of these, including the William Wallace tutorial campaign, are fairly short and only begin to approach the sense of style and cohesion pioneered by Blizzard's real-time strategy campaigns.

But you'll enjoy playing a part in these characters' historical accomplishments anyway, even if the narrators' accents are a little heavy and the artwork depicting the outcome of each mission looks rushed. At any rate, unlike in Starcraft, the campaigns seem more peripheral in Age of Kings, because its historical context and 13 civilizations will keep you interested with or without a plot to back it all up. Of course, you can also play Age of Kings over the Internet, although Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone can't compare to Blizzard's refined Battle.net.

No matter how you play it, chances are good that you'll enjoy Age of Kings if not for its careful historical detail then because its context never takes precedence over the game's playability. And if you've ever liked any other real-time strategy game in this classical style, then you'll clearly see why this one deserves so much credit, even in direct comparison to the finest examples in its category.

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Extremely impressive from a technical standpoint yet behind the times from a first-person-shooter design standpoint: This is the dichotomy that is Doom 3, the long-awaited sequel from well-known Texas-based developer id Software. Doom 3 is quite possibly the best-looking game ever, thanks to the brand-new 3D graphics engine used to generate its convincingly lifelike, densely atmospheric, and surprisingly expansive environments. At the same time, when you look past the spectacular appearance, you'll find a conventional, derivative shooter. In fact, if you played the original Doom or its sequel back in the mid '90s (or any popular '90s-era shooter, for that matter), you may be shocked by how similarly Doom 3 plays to those games. The legions of id Software's true believers will celebrate this straightforwardness as being deliberately "old school," especially since Doom 3 is packed with direct references to its classic predecessors. However, the truth of the matter is that Doom 3's gameplay structure and level design are behind the times and very much at odds with the game's cutting-edge, ultrarealistic looks. Yet the quality of the presentation truly is remarkable--enough so that it overwhelms Doom 3's occasional problems.

Doom 3 is essentially a remake of the original Doom, though series fans will find reimagined versions of almost every monster from both Doom and Doom II in the new sequel. You play as a nameless, voiceless 22nd-century space marine called by the Union Aerospace Corporation to its Mars research facility beset with mysterious problems--the forces of hell, to be exact. You'll end up single-handedly fighting back legions of hellspawn using weapons like shotguns, machine guns, and rocket launchers. As in the classic Doom games, your foes here are liable to strike at any time--often just as you round a corner, grab a much-needed power-up, or set foot into a new area. So, while your enemies will materialize without notice, and may occasionally startle you as they leap out of the darkness, Doom 3 cannot easily be described as scary or suspenseful. On the contrary, it's very predictable, and more or less it just goes through the same types of paces that you've probably gone through before in any number of other similar games.

Over the course of the game, you'll fight your way through a series of linear levels filled with locked doors, and you'll gradually find new weapons and occasionally meet new types of monsters. Early on, your apparent goal is to meet up with your squad, but as you might expect, you'll never actually get to fight alongside any human forces (no thanks to the omission of a co-op mode for multiple players, which was a signature element of past Doom games). Despite the game's cinematic trappings, it follows a formula that generally lacks drama or tension. Occasionally, the game presents to you a shocking or surprising scene--a hallucination or some hellish, otherworldly image. These moments are effective, but are too few and far between in the context of a single-player shooter that's of above-average length (somewhere between 15 to 20 hours). Fortunately, the campaign definitely picks up during the last several hours, once you finally reach (and keep going past) the point when you confront the enemy on its own turf. Getting to that point may be your primary motivation for trudging through some of the repetitive middle portions of the game, though.

Part of the issue is that Doom 3's storyline and narrative technique are ineffectual. Since the main character has no identity whatsoever (for whatever reason), the game tries to get you interested in everyone else on the base. You'll frequently find voice recordings and e-mail from various characters, but not only is a lot of this stuff bone dry, having to stop and read or stand around and listen to a rambling monologue jarringly disrupts the flow of the action. Unfortunately, if you choose to focus on the action by ignoring the seemingly extraneous story elements, you'll find that some of them aren't optional--you'll need to sift through those e-mails and listen to some of those voice recordings to get passcodes for locked doors and storage chests.

For what it's worth, the game's premise seems very fleshed out, and the game gives an amazing first impression. As you explore the UAC base, eavesdropping on various conversations and observing great, little details here and there, you'll get the impression that Doom 3 takes place in a fully realized world. Of course, all hell quickly breaks loose, and from that point onward you'll encounter scarce few creatures that you won't want to instantly shoot. The premise of the game will continue to unfold through occasional cutscenes and the aforementioned e-mails and recordings.

Since Doom 3 purports to have a plausible premise, suddenly, aspects of the game that you might not normally question will start to stick out as being annoyingly inconsistent. You'll undoubtedly find time to wonder about these logic gaps as you fight throughout the UAC base, especially if you've played other recent first-person shooters that do a better job of justifying their plots. Why would a 22nd-century space marine be sent into action in a darkly lit area without night vision goggles of some sort, or even a helmet? Why wouldn't any of his weapons have light-amplification modules built into them when even today's weapons frequently do? Why, instead, is he stuck carrying around a very weak flashlight with unlimited battery life? Why is he unable to hold a gun and the flashlight at the same time? Why are the UAC's small, spiderlike sentry drones so incredibly powerful? You'll see these helpful little guys rip through droves of hellspawn even faster than you can. If the base's defenses are so tough, then why is everyone so worried, and why is everyone getting killed? Doom 3's central gameplay conceit simply doesn't fit in with the premise of the game, and this is a problem only because Doom 3 chooses to try to make you feel like you're in a believable, fully realized world. Doom-inspired shooters, such as Serious Sam and Painkiller, wisely followed the classic game's arcadelike nature by never even purporting to be plausible and simply focusing on run-and-gun action. So it's ironic that Doom 3's ambitions to be a story-driven game mostly just end up getting in the way and weakening the overall experience.

Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 is the sequel to the popular 1996 spin-off of Westwood's definitive real-time strategy game. The latest game in the successful series isn't a dramatic technological improvement over any of its predecessors, and its hammy alternate-World War II setting borders on being tasteless. However, Red Alert 2 is a very polished game that combines tried-and-true play mechanics with enough new features, improvements, and enhancements to make it both an excellent sequel and a great real-time strategy game in its own right.

Red Alert 2 retains many of the conventional mechanics established and reused in the various Command & Conquer real-time strategy games. As with its predecessors, Red Alert 2 encompasses most all of the elements that define the genre. You view the action from an isometric perspective typical of most other 2D real-time strategy games, and you play using most of the same exact controls from previous Command & Conquer episodes. The formula still works just fine - you can easily select and move your groups of units, which generally do a good job navigating the game's environments. Red Alert 2 doesn't offer any especially advanced options for your units - for instance, you can't move or array your troops in preset formations, and you can't order your troops to automatically scout or return for repairs and such. But it's just as well, because the units are autonomous in more important ways - they're good about automatically acquiring enemy targets, and they're generally responsive to orders, if only because the game itself plays very smoothly.

Even so, you might initially have some trouble directing your attacks, because it can be difficult to see incoming enemy units on the game's minimap, especially at higher resolutions. Also, when you set units to battle groups, the number corresponding to the group appears a little too large next to each unit; it can almost eclipse some of the smaller infantry. These minor problems may take getting used to, while most other aspects of Red Alert 2's interface just make the game more accessible and more rewarding as you get better at it. For instance, you can set waypoints for several groups of units and thereby conduct these groups simultaneously, though doing so might not always be viable in the heat of battle.

Though the right-hand vertical interface bar in Red Alert 2 will seem instantly familiar if you've played a Command & Conquer game before, you'll soon find that this particular interface is actually much better. The lower portion of the interface, which is used for building all the various units and structures available to your faction, is divided under four tabs: You click on the respective production tab to see all your available base infrastructure, base defenses, infantry units, and vehicle units. This division makes it easy to quickly find the right unit or structure you want to build. Red Alert 2 also lets you queue up multiple units for production, set rally points, and customize the keyboard hotkeys to your preference.

The interface also introduces what's a fairly significant change - and what's a fairly significant improvement - to the way that this Command & Conquer plays. You can generally build only one type of thing at a time under each production tab, though there are exceptions, as you can build land, sea, and air vehicles all at once from the vehicles tab. However, you can also build from any and all of the tabs simultaneously. Previous Command & Conquer games restricted you to having to build only one type of structure at a time, which meant that as you built up your stationary base defenses, including walls and gun turrets, you'd have to forego building new facilities that unlock the strongest units. However, in Red Alert 2, you can build structures and defenses simultaneously. This change actually goes a long way toward making the gameplay even more fast-paced, since you can - and should - now oversee the production of base infrastructure as well as defenses all at once. This also makes the resource management aspect of Red Alert 2 even more interesting, since you need to balance your resources more carefully.

You need to harvest your resources from mineral patches by using special mining vehicles, as in all other Command & Conquer games. While the real-time strategy genre has recently seen a backlash against resource management elements - tactical combat games that completely exclude resource management have become quite common - the resource gathering in Red Alert 2 is actually an interesting part of the game. On one level, it's very simple - as soon as you build a refinery, its miner vehicle immediately and automatically sets out toward the nearest mineral patch. The miners are fast and efficient as they go about their business - and for the first time in a Command & Conquer game, and perhaps for the first time in any real-time strategy game, your miners aren't a complete liability. Actually, the mining vehicles are distinctly different between the game's Allied and Soviet factions - the Allied miner instantly teleports back to its refinery as soon as it's full. If you need to rescue it in a pinch, you can also make it teleport back to base at will. The Soviet miner is more self-reliant; it's heavily armored, and it packs a powerful machine gun that can shred groups of infantry and light vehicles. Neither of these vehicles is susceptible to early-game attacks that might otherwise cripple a player's economy before he could assemble a sizable force.