Total War!!!

My bro just got Medieval II Total War Gold Edition as it runs fairly smoothly on his laptop...been wanting to play this game and I highly recommend it..Love the combination of the strategic element upon a campaign map that resembles playing the boardgame "Risk" and a real-time strategic placement of troops upon the battlefield for simulation and warfare. To properly explain this, here's introducing a series of design diary clips from the designers themselves...

Cities, castles...it's a bit like Risk eh?


The importance of religion in Total War....elements that need to be micromanaged in the game...


Siege Warfare...the real-time strategy element kicks in here....


Introducing what comprises of a typical medieval army...


And now showing what happens on the open battlefield...continuing the real-time strategy element here....


The Britannia Campaign..(English, Scottish, Vikings, forts, castles, war museums...was so glad that I managed to experience all of it during my SEP :p)


The Crusades..reference this to the Kingdom of Heaven clip at the bottom...

Was brought into the Total War series by first starting on Rome Total War...and that led to an increased interest in Roman history (stuff like its society, military tactics) and that was why I was so excited when I actually got to go to Rome and Italy during my SEP trip. (slight digress :p) Interestingly, I also remembered how one of my JC classmates, Po-lung, would tell me so much about the Shogun and the predecessor Total War series too during our JC days...and I would go nodding my head and half-acknowledging his words (obviously I sounded totally sian and clueless to what he was talking about at that time!!!)......but had I played these games back in those days, I guess I would have appreciated more of his words.

The Total War series has been revolutionary in terms of gaming and bringing up interest in history. In fact, some interesting facts to share here...

1) The game engine for the strategy map was used in 2 series of TV programmes (Decisive Battles by the History Channel and Time Commanders by BBC2) where it was used to recreate famous battles on TV with certain fine-tunes by real military historians and academics to maximise history accuracy. These programmes are really interesting documentaries on their own.

2) Perhaps the most powerful effect has been the increased interest in military history, whether it is in the Roman times or the medieval times. So much so that even Hollywood came in with many big budget epic movies.....think Gladiator, Troy, Alexander, Kingdom of Heaven and 300. Actually, Gladiator came in before all of these and the effect of increased interest in Roman and classical history was dubbed the "Gladiator Effect" by the New York Times. The Total War series happened to run through this time period and served to reinforce this interest.

And presenting the very defining moment in cinematic history from Gladiator....one of my favourite cinematic battles...the one that started the Gladiator Effect


Another favourite....the battle for Jerusalem in the Crusades...