Following on from yesterdays look at the classic racing game ‘Unirally’ for the SNES, I have decided to make ‘Games That Time Forgot’ a regular spot here on Team Teabag!, and to celebrate that fact I will be posting about one classic game a day until the weekend, when this will fall to a weekly spot. So without further ado, on to todays game…

A classic turn based, fantasy game, ‘Master of Magic‘ was released in 1995 by Microprose for the PC. It saw you cast as one of 5 warring wizards trying to take over both the world of Arcanus and the parallel world of Myrror. You have a choice of 14 races for your starting people, ranging from Elves and Humans, to the lizard like Klackons. The game world is randomly generated each game, ensuring you will never play the same game twice, and the AI is pretty fiendish, so even now this is still a difficult game. After the last update MoM needed a staggering 386 processor and 512kb of RAM to run.

When the game starts you can choose from one of 14 pre-generated characters, or customise them to have whichever combinations of skills and magic you see fit. You are then let loose on the world of Arcanus (or Myrror if you took the ‘Myrron’ skill) with one small city. You will then need to start exploring the world and expanding your empire. On top of the other empires in the game, you will also come across neutral cities, dungeons, wizards towers, caves and nodes around the map, each of these taking your army into the combat screen when you enter them. Wizards towers also serve as the link between the two worlds, so when your army is standing on an empty wizards tower they transport themselves to the matching tower on the opposite world.

Once you are in combat, it swaps to a battlefield view where you can control all of your troops. You take it in turns to move and attack with your troops, with different battlefield features offering different bonuses, roads for example only cost 1/2 normal movement to move along. You can get a lot of strange magical beasts for your army in this game, like giants, basilisks, skeletons, sprites, etc. all with their own magical abilities, on top of this your hero can also cast spells into the battle for a cost that varies depending on how far from your capital the battle occurs.

Of course, like any good strategy game of this type, you also need to collect resources and build up you cities to produce better troops. Resources are decided by the squares that immediately surround a city, these values are halved if 2 cities share the same squares. There are 4 resources in MoM, food, gold and research and mana. Food is a balancing act, produce too much and you are wasting money in other lost resources, produce too little and your people die of starvation. Gold is used to pay the bills and buy friends, troops and your way out of tight situations. Mana is used to cast your magic in both battles and on the overworld map and research is used to discover new spells for your leader.

This game became ‘abandonware’ long ago, so if you are interested you can legally download the entire game for free from here… I will warn you all though, you will need to do some fiddling with compatibility settings in order to get this to run under Windows XP, and it runs incredibly slowly under the ‘DOSBox‘ MS-DOS emulator. This game does still have a cult following and there have been a few projects to try and bring a new version to our computers, the most recent being the ‘Master of Magic .NET’ project, that was put on hold in the tail end of last year, but so far none of them have ever reached completion.

This was easily my favorite PC game of the ‘386‘ era, and still a game I love to this day. I really hope one of these project to make a new version of this game gets completed, I need one more dose of ‘Torin’ related goodness.

Here is a link to a review of the game, back from 1994 before the game was released to the public… Well worth a read.

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