You'll like what's crashed into this page. Really.
The Egyptians are giving me grief. Not the flesh-and-blood kind, rather, the ones in my computer. I spend my nights pounding their little citadels into submission, only to have my Greek warriors sliced into shawerma.
I'm addicted to Age of Mythology, an obsession that involves building an empire and rousting the neighbours. In my head, my faux-dictatorship is as real as yesterday's No Doze. Trumpets make me tense, and the doorbell makes me feel like running for shelter.
I'm sizing up the trees in my front yard for wood, and I can even recognise a few more words from my Greek barber (a change from 'twenty-five bucks mate' and 'this should stop the bleeding').
More objectively, I'm intrigued by the mythology of the game. If you haven't yet played, the AOM campaign has you flinging swords as Greek hero Arkantos. Like a cross between Homer's Odyssey and the Boxing Day sales frenzy, Arkantos' major quest involves helping some Egyptian bint find and reassemble the pieces of the god Osiris, tossed to the four corners of the world.
Despite the fact that Greece didn't even rate as a chipshop in the first Egyptian dynasty, this stab at the mythos is reasonably accurate. According to Egyptian legend, there was a great feud between the King of the Gods -- Osiris -- and his brother Seth. Seth came up with a plan to dispose of his sibling -- cut him into pieces, and send his bits down the river ('his head went that way and his leg went that way'). Isis, wife of Osiris, then had to go on a long journey to find the pieces, eventually reassembling her husband into the first mummy.
But there's more to this story than the game lets on. Seth apparently severed the phallus of Osiris and dropped it into the Nile, where it was eaten by a fish (d'oh!). When Isis pieced her husband back together, she was forced to make a replacement member out of clay (presumably the first written evidence of the word 'dildo'). Oh, the perils of being an Egyptian god.
There's equally sordid tales from Greek mythology -- things you'll never see in a Microsoft product. Ever wondered where the Minotaur came from? The legend tells of a witch called Pasiphae who was afflicted with an unnatural desire for bulls (that's right -- bulls). With the help of Daidalos, Pasiphae hid herself in a cow made of wood and. . . the rest is history. Not the easiest thing to animate in a computer game, sure, but a lot more accurate.
The Norse legends are also questionable. Loki , God of Fire and Chaos, could apparently change his sex at will. As the original indoor sportsman, Loki mated with a number of lesser gods in quick succession, fathering Hel, Goddess of Death, Jörmungand the Serpent, and Fenrir the Wolf. Then as a woman he bore Sleipnir, God of Sexual Ambiguity (just jokes). I'm starting to see why the Scandinavians invented the kilt. . .
I'm guessing there are only so many legends the game developers can savage. What then? Well, I've consulted my crystal ball (the same one that said Kim Beazley would become PM and that the mullet would make a comeback) and my prediction is a strategy game set in the present day, called Age of Mediocrity. The game goes something like this. . .
Rather than a central village, you're based around a suburban house. Farms become computer desks, where you work to make cash, not crops. Forests become rubbish dumps or footy grounds, for collecting Aluminium cans. Gold mines are nightclubs or bars, where you score for each 'score' (you can either take your partner back to the house, or to a nearby panel van).
Then there's the special units: the Jehovah's Witness, knocking on homes until you're forced to leave; the Slut, a nightclub patron that distributes viruses; and the Greenie that forces dumps to be relocated to the other side of the map. There's also the Property Developer that bulldozes everything in its path, and the Shane Warne unit that performs like a champion, until your opponents research pharmaceuticals.
My biggest concern is that the game will be unrealistically sanitised. The last thing I want to see is milkmen who only deliver milk, or council workers who actually work. Let's face it -- there's only so much mythology we can bear.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009