On my way out the door to work this morning I realized I didn't have my pass. After searching the house it was nowhere to be found. In order to get a new one I had to call my supervisor...which is easier said then done. He's (my supervisor) is over seventy years old and can't hear or remember anything. It's also very likely that he has alzheimer's. During
the two hours it took me to get in touch with him I decided to play one of the games from the genesis era. Warrior of Rome 2 baby! This will also be the first in a series that I call "Then
and now". You know how you would play a game as a kid and think it was the best thing ever, then one day when your older you decide to play it again and it's not quite as good as you remember? Well that's what I wanna cover here! What my impressions where then and what they are now. I think it will be interesting to see the differences. So here we go! Warrior of rome 2 baby!



Then

It all dropped on a day that my cousin, aunt and I went down to the local video rental store called "Balls". Yes, it was called "Balls" I shit you not. Anyway, after entering "balls" my cousin and I went straight for the video game section. On route we were distracted by a large bin with genesis games for sale. It wasn't long before we were standing in the the bin digging with collapsable shovels looking for the gem that had to be there. When I was close to giving up I found it "Warrior of rome 2" It's gleaming plastic case with muscular roman man riding muscular roman steed. To my suprise when I flipped it over it was a strategy game and not a cheap zelda rip off. At this time I loved strategy games because they were the most in depth gaming experience you could have. So without any hesitation I took it the counter and never looked back.

After getting back to my cousins place the dart for the bedroom and pop it in. The title screen goes trough it's phases as we tap every button possible to try and bypass this torturous waiting game...Then finally we come to the menu and we are confronted with so many options it makes our heads spin...not your measely start new game or continue...but real options! Of course being as impatient as we were we blindly started a new game. The screen lights up with our new playground and we're amazed by the technical look of the whole thing. After a few minutes we realized we had no idea what in the hell to do. For god sakes we didn't even know how to move a unit!



Also who would of knew that A unit was represented by a tent with a bicycle flag! Looking trough the instuction manual was like looking trough an encyclopedia (funny considering civs has one lol) but eventually we learned enough to get by. Not really knowing our true cause we would just send units randomly across the screen looking for enemies. Sometimes we would kick ass and other times we would sit scour the ends of the map not really knowing our heads from our asses. In all truth we just loved the fact we had this much control and this whole world even if we really didn't understand it. We loved the game but not really for what it had to offer in terms of fun and gameplay.