The Ancient Art of War

Game developer: Evryware
Game publisher: Broderbund
Game release date: 1984 year
Game status: Released

The ancient art of war is a book written by Sun Tzu who was a warlord in ancient China about military strategies. (the exact details are somewhat different but it's too much to write here) Obviously it's the perfect candidate to make a strategy game of and so they did. In the game you must lead your armies in several scenarios against other famous generals like Napoleon, Ceasas and of course Sun Tzu himself.

There is no campaign mode or anything like that, you can select a number of battles some of which are historical in nature and with the troops already deployed on the field you'll have to win the scenario by reaching your objectives. The scenario's differ quite a lot as some simply let you race for a flag but others require you to wipe out the enemy completely. You can also chose to change the difficulty level of the game by adjusting parameters like the morale of your troops or wether towns will give you support while troops are stationed there. Most of the game is shown as an overhead map where you can see (or not depending on the settings) all the troops but when two armies clash you can also zoom in and give more specific orders during an actual fight. You cannot control warriors directly though as you can only give commands to a group which they then follow.

I have a lot of fond memories of this game as I remember playing it on an old XT pc running at only 4 Mhz. Obviously the graphics aren't very good considering it only has a 4-color CGA mode but that didn't bother me much then. If you can look past that the game offers quite a challenge. Apparently there was a EGA/VGA version released much later but I've never seen. There is an option to make a campaign yourself however it doesn't work as it keeps asking for a data disk.

Game genre: Strategy Games, Real-time Strategies
Platform/System: MS-DOS Games, Amiga Games, Mac Games, Apple 2 Games, Atari ST Games