Cheap Conquest of the New World Deluxe / Castles 2 (Jewel Case) (Software) (Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows Me) Price

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Customer Reviews of Conquest of the New World Deluxe / Castles 2 (Jewel Case)

Classic but buyers beware
Almost 10 years ago, when CNW came out, I took it home and fell in love with it. It's a turn based "city building" type game, with battles fought in a chess like manner. <
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>The whole idea of the game was to basically take your starting settler who has just landed in this foreign new world, find the best possible place to start a new town, and grow it from there. Resources like iron and timber was needed to upgrade and expand your town, while gold was used to build and upgrade armies. Usually having special resources, like a gold vein within your town vincity gives you a game winning edge. Occasionally, your town will be attacked by nearby Indian tribes, which you can eliminate easily once you get your fort and war college up, and an army built. So they are only a nuisance near the start. <
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>Of course you will eventually run into other nations and your goal is to pretty much conquer them and claim the new world as your own. <
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>Trade plays a fairly important part of the game too. Once your colony is producing excess goods, you can establish a trade route with your mother country and earn extra income this way. <
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>Now I would have easily given this game 5 stars but for one gripe. This edition is the exact same MS-DOS version they released in 1996, which means it will in all probabilty NOT run on your computer. I bought this to relive the old memories but had all sorts of problems, eg. video card not compatible, sound card not detected etc. (My cyrix You can use an emulator to get around this, such as DOSBOX but bear in mind it will run so slow you basically cannot play it. <
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>That's pretty much it. If you have a decade old computer, this is a great game to get. Otherwise you'll probably be wasting your time. <
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Great, simple fun
By today's standards, these games might be less-than-stellar, but do not lack playability. In college, I spent a great deal of time playing these due to hopeless addiction when I probably should have been studying.

Conquest of the New World is your standard empire builder (build settlements, upgrade technologies, raise armies, fight hostiles and eventually declare independence from your mother country after she taxes the hell out of you, then proceed on to crush your fellow colonial powers). A chess board-like structured combat scenario (playing as the English reveals great bagpipe combat tunes) offers little in the way of combat tactics; if your forces are greater in number and better trained, you'll most likely win. It was a treat to have a good deal of historical trivia meted out while the AI completes its turns. Again, by modern gaming standards, it pales in comparison, but at the time it was quite entertaining; not bad for a jewel-case purchase.

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386 Compatible Only
I picked this up [inexpensively] and encountered the common "You get what you pay for." Later that day, I drove it back. This software doesn't run on Win XP, or 98. Only thing I can guess by the date of the product, it goes back to the 386 and maybe 486 non-math co-proccessor days. Too bad because it is suppose to have about 30min. of castle footage from some BBC special. But, if the footage is monochrome or VGA quality, you'd be better off finding the video. Interplay provides little support more than what is commonly known about these MS-DOS products already circulated (PIF, driver issues, and other compatibility notes). This is typical of some of the larger companies though. It's very sad that the product has almost slipped beyond 'the bin' to 'abandonedware'. But if you have a 286 you might love the graphics because everyone I talked to can't see them.