Majesty Gold

by Atari

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005QIQR
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: January 15, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,886 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: PC

Amazon.com Product Description

The award-winning, genre-creating "indirect RTS" game Majesty is now available bundled with its expansion pack Majesty: The Northern Expansion.

Ever wonder what it would be like to sit on the throne of a growing fantasy kingdom? To enlist the aid of wizards, elves, barbarians, and other fantastic heroes in tackling epic fantasy's classic challenges? If you feel the lure of the crown, Majesty is for you.

Majesty is a unique sim putting you in the crushed-velvet hot seat of your own kingdom. With an epic quest before you, you make the decisions of where to build your settlement's guilds and temples. From these you recruit a varied cast of larger-than-life heroes. Each one has a mind of his own and must be enticed to meet your goals, via rewards you offer and spells you cast. Meanwhile you must make sure that your treasury stays flush with cash to support these and other outlays necessary to maintain a thriving medieval town. The fact that you are being barraged by attacks from mythical beasts and fantastic creatures doesn't make your job any easier. Poor choices will leave your kingdom in ruin, but a wise ruler will complete quests, fill the coffers, and create a kingdom that will be remembered in song and story.

The Northern Expansion (inlcuded in this Gold edition) is the expansion set for Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim. It will provide you with all new challenges for you and your heroes. There is more of everything that made Majesty great: new quests, buildings, monsters, lairs, spells, and art. The way is clear: the northern expanses await your rule.

Product Description

Prepare for new challenges! The kingdom of Ardania is basking in an era of peace and prosperity. The crown's enemies have been vanquished and the population is happy. The time has come for you to command your minions and restless heroes to explore the vast uncharted Northern lands.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Polished, Innovative, November 22, 2002

By 

Blake Watson "===Blake===" (Winnetka, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Majesty Gold (CD-ROM)

Majesty entered a world where RTSes had been solidly institutionalized for over five years (the four Xes, eXplore, eXploit, eXpand and eXterminate) and put a genuinely new twist on things.

In Majesty, you don't waste your time mining and directing minions to go hither and yon. You build your castle, your kingdom's amenities and, as you can afford themn, hero guilds. Each hero guild can support a certain number of heroes (usually 4), although you'll usually have to buy heroes.

But fret not, because each hero will pay you back many times over by visiting your marketplaces, blacksmiths, inns, and son on. In addition, each guild generates a bit of money on its own, and some provide extra services which can generate revenue.

Your tax collectors will walk from building to building collecting gold, ultimately returning it to your castle or nearby guard houses, while your heroes do whatever they do best. (Rangers explore, rogues steal, and so on.)

The more you build, the more support buildings (peasant huts) will pop up, themselves generating some revenue. Other side effects of urban life (like sewer drains) will appear, too.

The lands are always plagued with some menace or other, however, and its your job as king to make the world safe for--well, your taxpayers. Majesty, however, unlike most other RTSes, gives you no means to directly manipulate your subjects.

If you want a monster dead, then, you must place a bounty on it. If you're trying to destroy the evil crypt generating vampires, you must place a bounty on that. If you want to explore a dark area of the map, you can place an explore flag and try to draw heroes there--for a price.

All-in-all, this formula works, though it's not yet perfected. The balance between building facilities (like the marketplace) and building the guilds/generating heroes that you need to protect your kingdom is very well done. The heroes autonomy is good: Sometimes the destruction of a certain target will result in a greater evil being released, so you'll want to delay that--but your Paladins will have other ideas. On the other hand, your heroes can be so aggressive on their own that they win the game for you while you're not even aware of it.

If you've built a solid infrastructure for your city, you know you've won. The difference between a beginner's game and an expert's game becomes whether you can survive the opening minutes, and occasionally how well you prepare for the trigger event (the accomplishing of one goal that results in a rush of monsters).

So, if the game has a fault, it's that it's too easy. I don't mind; I enjoyed all the scenarios and liked that I could finish them.

Majesty Gold includes the Northern Expansion, an add-on of modest proportions with some tweaks to the rules to make the game harder. The add-on parts, with the tougher, winter-oriented monsters, are quite cool. The tweaks to the game rules, on the other hand, show the game's relative newness. They do make the game harder, but only by way of making it somewhat more frantic in those opening minutes: Even with the tweaks, it's an easy game.

But that's to be expected: The designers can't directly borrow from Starcraft (and clones) to get ideas. They have a new framework to figure out. Majesty 2 is not a shoo-in at this point, but let's hope the developers get a chance to do it. This is an interesting new direction that should be explored.

Meanwhile, we have this game, with solid gameplay, great artwork from industry stalwart Cyberlore, and remarkably few bugs.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quite enjoyable!, October 11, 2002

By 

Ny-er (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Majesty Gold (CD-ROM)

I bought this game on a whim and have been quite delighted with it. It's very simplistic, you're not getting a lot of strategy play or shoot 'em up stuff (like in CIV III, Warcraft or Empire Earth), but at the same time it's highly addictive.

Perhaps its simplicity is the key. That, and the delightful narrator who sounds suspiciously like Sean Connery. The premise is that you get an area map of the kingdom with all kinds of quests or challenges that you must complete -- from wiping out the monsters, to reclaiming your crown, seeking the holy chalice, to rescuing your son who's been kidnapped by evil elves. The beginner levels will get you into the game and understand how it works; it's fairly intuitive and a fast learn. The advanced levels offer some challenge; some more difficult than others, and will test your ability to logically figure out solutions. I've yet to get to the expert levels.

While there is fighting in this game, once you build your "army" (consisting of necromancers, wizards, warriors, rogues and explorers), they automatically fight any enemy that enters your domain. They will also go off and fight enemies at greater distances. You can set reward flags up to have your army target and destroy one enemy camp over another.

Another great aspect of this game is that you get to build up your little kingdom. You place your wizards' guild, your rogues' guild, your warriors' guild and then magically houses begin to sprout up and pad out your town. You also upgrade your levels with gold, research new attack methods with a library or through the guilds, and create marketplaces and blacksmith's shops. Upgrading will get you new types of buildings (like temples) and you can watch your castle grow along with your kingdom.

You get, in this package, not only the original game, but the second release add on of the game for further adventures and quests.

It's a fun, addictive game. The quests can be short or long, not requiring a high demand on time that some games do, and is fairly straight-forward to play. I could see both children and adults enjoying this game (there's no vulgarity, but there are some jokes and humor with dialogue).

Enjoy the game. I have.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great, enjoyable game!, March 4, 2002

By 

Mark Pollock "educator" (Davis, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Majesty Gold (CD-ROM)

First of all, this version is a substantial improvement over the original, because the music actually works!

The game itself is a blast - easy to learn, but not so easy to master. You can learn the strategies, and you can be successful, yet the game isn't so easy that you can simply "win" it in an hour.

In otherwords, it's within almost everybody's capabilities. It won't leave you feeling stupid, and it's not a cakewalk either.

One gripe - why is the Northern expansion seperate from the regular edition, when the Northern expansion INCLUDES the regular edition? If you start playing games in the regular edition, then go to the Norhtern expansion, you lose all the games you won beforehand. Wierd.

Overall, very enjoyable. Get the gold edition.

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