Games That Time Forgot: Mega-Lo-Mania (Megadrive)
Author: Vince | Date: July 28, 2008
Way back in the deepest, darkest depths of 1992, Sensible Software (those of Sensible Soccer fame) released Mega-lo-Mania for the Amiga, Atari ST, Megadrive, SNES and PC. In a nutshell, Mega-lo-Mania is a RTS-God game, casting you as one of four gods battling for supremacy of the world, which is achieved by destroying them over 10 epoch’s (era’s in time) ranging from 9500BC all the way to 2001AD. Each epoch has it’s own visual style and set of offensive and defensive weapons, and is cleared when you have claimed all 3 islands on the level. This was easily one of the most accessible and addictive god games released for home video game consoles in the early 90’s, especially when compared to Powermonger!
After selecting from the four available characters, you are dumped onto the first world armed with only 100 men and a hellbent desire to take over the world. You then get to choose from one of the three available islands to try and conquer and decide how many of your men you want to use on the level, and here lies the first skill you have to master on this game, man management. You are gifted 100 men at the start of each new epoch in the overworld map, but in addition to these you get to carry over all of your unused men from the previous worlds, making it vitally important not to use too many men on the earlier levels.
Once you have selected a level, you are prompted to choose how many of your men you want to use to conquer the world and then your starting sector on the game map. Sometimes your opponents will wait for you to decide, other times they will jump right in and choose their starting sector first. When you get in to the game proper you will have a few choices of what to do with your men, the first (and most important) thing you will need to do is assign them to do research to develop new weapons and defenses to aid your conquest. In addition to research, you can also assign your men to be miners, factory workers, soldiers, you can arm them with a defensive weapons and mount them on your structures turrets or you can leave them doing nothing, which will make them reproduce.
The game itself is very tactical and is all about getting the right balance of research and war, as you will advance up to 3 tech levels on each island allowing greater access to new structures (like the mine, lab or factory) and making it faster to research new technologies. The things you design are made from the natural resources available in the area your castle is in, and each one has its own ideal recipe, which if you manage to create will cause the now legendary ‘ergonomically terriffic‘ soundbite to play. Once you have the tools you can send your men off to crush your enemies, using everything from stones and catapults to biplanes and UFOs to reduce them to nothing. You claim victory on an island when all of your opponents are wiped out. Your path to success can be made easier by forming an alliance with one of the computer
players, but be careful as they will quite often cancel your treaty and instantly side up with one of your opponents.
The game carries on like this through the first 9 epochs, with the added ability from the 6th epoch onwards to put your men into cryogenic stasis ready for the big final battle. Once you reach the 10th epoch the game changes slightly. Firstly there is only one island, called Mega-lo-Mania, a giant 4×4 map with all 4 players and no castles. You are equipped only with the men you have put into stasis, who are now all equipped with laser guns, and the only objective is to be the last god standing.
This game has stood the test of time well and is still as much fun today as it was 15 years ago. The graphics are pretty good for their time and all of the odd little sound bites are still pretty amusing. The one downside of this game being that the controls were quite clunky for both the Megadrive and SNES versions, a problem that I guess is not shared by the Amiga, ST and PC versions which use a mouse and keyboard, but as I never played any of those versions I couldn’t say for definite. The only game released around this time that could rival Mega-lo-Mania would be Populous, and it’s fair to say there is a big enough difference between the 2 that they could quite happily sit along side each other in your collection.
Mega-lo-Mania is now available for free on the PC thanks to the joys of abandonware, download it from here!
:O Amiga!
We’re running out of elephants!
Great game, and one I’d certainly recommend anyone to check out. Amiga version was the best in my opinion, but the Genesis/Megadrive version uses the same code, just had colour reduced graphics , downsampled sound and a tweaked joypad UI.
~Stoo~