Mega Lo Mania

The time when microcomputers dominated and monopolized many homes is talking about distant times. In the eighties, with NES and Master System consoles, there was a big price difference between making video games on cartridge or tape, not to mention the royalties that had to be paid to the owners of the consoles, Nintendo and SEGA. Mega Lo Mania, known as Tyrants: Fight Through Time in the United States, is a game programmed by Sensible Software and published and distributed by Image Works for Amiga in 1991, being later ported to Mega Drive, Super Nintendo, PC, Atari ST, and Sharp X68000. Maybe you’ve never heard of this game before, even with how popular a modern game made its name, so let’s see what this title is all about!

About the game

The primary objective of the game is to conquer the 28 islands, which are divided into nine epochs that comprise the history of mankind. We can choose one of the 4 available tyrants/gods, who must watch over and ensure the safety of their territories.

For this, we must give instructions to the inhabitants of our lands to do specific tasks, such as constructing buildings, designing weapons, searching for elements in mines, and forming armies. Our ultimate goal is to defeat the rest of the tyrants by destroying their towers and eliminating their people.

In each historical period, we are given 100 soldiers, which we must manage when sending to an enemy area to dominate it and make it ours. The islands are also divided into grids called sectors, in each of which we can find various materials for the construction of buildings, weapons, or defensive elements. When we build better weapons and more modern and better quality buildings, our civilization will evolve.

Mega Lo Mania was one of those titles designed from scratch to be released on this system, as it is a real-time strategy game that also came out in a version for consoles like Mega Drive and Super Nintendo, which adapted the control as they could to the controller. But the truth is that playing a game of this type with the mouse was an obvious plus. In fact, it is enough to see a few games on both systems to see the difference, being a genre that has never really taken off on consoles.

An innovator

The game -despite its obvious shortcomings today- ends up hooking, as the different environments and situations make it fun to manage our troops, although graphically it is discreet -remember that Warcraft came out three years later- and that the game system is not 100% polished, since on many occasions we win without really knowing why, and we die almost in the same way, seeing how our enemies pull out troops even under the stones to raze us to the ground.

Review: 7.5/10

Mega Lo Mania was one of the first real strategy games, and as such in a genre under construction, it came at a time when the boom of this type of game would start with Blizzard's Warcraft, but despite this, it was ported to different systems other than Amiga 500.

Pros:

• Original gameplay
• Good sound effects and music.
• Awesome graphics.

Cons:

• It is easy to become overwhelmed with the number of things to do.
• Hasn't aged that well