trisystech’s Giza aims
WHAT’S HOT
to fill that niche with a challenging game of trading,
building, and managing, all in a venue that puts you
in the role of a Pharaoh in ancient Egypt. Your
goal is to build your pyramid, guaranteeing your place
in the after-life. In order to do that, you’ll
have to build up a fleet of trading ships, trade
commodities with other Mediterranean ports in order to
build your wealth to buy the tools and pay your
workers and you’ll have to keep an eye on the harvests
as well to make sure your people have enough to eat.
There’s a lot a Pharaoh has to keep track of to
engrave your name in history.
Giza installs using the
SETUP
standard ActiveSync Add/Remove programs feature.
You can install the program in Main Memory or on a
Storage Card without any significant speed issues.
The installation routine also puts a shortcut in the
"Games" folder of your Pocket PC’s Start menu, exactly
where it should be.
When Giza starts, you’ll get the main menu screen as
shown below:
Giza main screen
Before
we get to the program itself, we’ll take a look at the Settings option.
Clicking
on the 
option calls up the screen you see below:
Giza Settings screen
The Settings screen allows you to adjust the Music
volume and the Sound volume. The program plays
background music constantly. If you find it
distracting, you can set the Music volume all the way
down. Sound volume controls the volume of other
sound effects that occur throughout the program.
PROGRAM FEATURES
Starting a New Game
Clicking on 
calls up the series of dialogs you’ll see below:
Giza Difficulty Settings
screen
First, you choose the level of difficulty. The
level of difficulty not only sets how "forgiving" the
game play is, but it also sets how much "help" you’ll
get along the way. We’ll take a look at the help
in a moment. You’ll probably want to start out
on the easy level the first time you play the game
just to get used to how to play. When you select
your difficulty level, you’ll be taken to the Map
screen
you see below:
Giza Map screen
One
the "Easy" level, you’ll also get the first set of help from
"Ra" as shown below:
Giza Help popup
Clicking anywhere on the screen while help is
displayed will advance to the next help balloon until
Ra is done talking. (He’s a bit verbose.)
When he’s done, you’ll be able to use the rest of the
screen.
One further note: When Ra is talking, he also "pauses
time" as shown by the icon at the bottom on the far
right. So you don’t need to worry about things
happening while you’re giving Ra the attention he
deserves. You can also pause time yourself, at
any point within the game, by clicking on the button
on the far right. It will toggle from "Play" to
"Pause" and back again. This is useful if you
get interrupted and don’t want things happening while
you’re answering the phone or something.
To the left of the Play/Pause control is the "Controls" icon.
Clicking on it will call up the screen you see below:
Giza Controls screen
The volume settings we’ve already seen. In
addition, there’s an option to Quit the game and
another to Save the game. The later is very
helpful because games can last for some time.
You’re not likely to be able to complete a game in one
sitting. Fair warning here: You can only
save one game at a time.
Back
on the Map screen, there are three buttons on the left at the bottom.
We’ll visit them from left to right. The first is the 
(Pharaoh) button. It calls up the screen you see below:
Giza Pharaoh screen
The Pharaoh screen shows your personal statistics.
At the top is the date. It appears on all of the
game-play screens. Below that is the amount of
Gold you have, the Population of your city-state, and
the rate the population Grows. Below that are
selectors for setting the monthly tax rate, the acres
of land you’ll plant with wheat, the amount of wheat
you have in storage, your monthly tithe, and your
monthly cost of ship upkeep. Your tax rate
determines how much wheat from the monthly harvest is
saved for your use. The amount of wheat you
have, both in acres planted and in storage, determines
how well your people are fed. If wheat is left
over from feeding your people, it’s placed in storage.
The monthly title goes to the gods. It
determines whether your ships are kept safe while
they’re at sea. The monthly ship upkeep depends
on the number and type of ships you own.
You’ll notice that the Pharaoh button has been replaced with
a Map button. Clicking on that will return to
the Map screen.
The
next button to the right is the 
(Ship) button. It calls up the screen shown below:
Giza Ships screen
The Ships screen allows you to buy and sell ships.
To the left at the top, you’ll see how much you’re
currently paying in ship upkeep. To the right of
that you’ll see the amount of gold you have and the
types of ships with the number of each you have.
Clicking on a ship type will change the bottom of the
screen similar to what’s shown below:
Giza Buying or Selling a
ship
Along with the Vessel Type, you’ll also see the crew
size, speed, cargo space, upkeep, and price to buy and
sell. The crew comes out of your population.
The speed determines how fast the ship can move from
city to city. The cargo space determines how
many tons of any particular commodity you’ll be able
to carry in the ship. As you might guess, faster
and bigger ships cost more. Upkeep includes the
cost of maintaining the ship and paying the crew.
As you’ve probably noticed already, it cost more to
purchase a ship than you’ll get when you sell it.
(That’s life.)
As you accrue more gold from trading, you’ll be able to
upgrade you fleet to bigger and better ships.
Those ships, in turn will allow you to trade faster
and in greater quantities. We’ll discuss trading
again when we return to the Map screen.
Clicking
on the 
(Pyramid) button calls up the screen shown below:
Giza Pyramid screen
The Pyramid screen reveals the goal of the game.
Your purpose, as Pharaoh, is to construct your
pyramid. Doing so will guarantee you a place in
the after-life. In order to build your pyramid,
you’ll need workers and tools. You’ll have to
trade to get the tools. Workers will come from
your population.
Finally, clicking
on the Map button will return you to the Map screen
and allow you to engage in trading.
Giza Map screen
Each
of the red dots on the map indicates a port with which you can trade.
Clicking on the dot will open a screen like the one shown below:
Giza Trading Port screen
Under the name of the port, you’ll see a selector
which you can use to select any given commodity.
Commodities include tools (which you’ll need to build
your pyramid, but which you can also trade), textiles,
spices, jewelry, liquor, sugar, grain, and livestock.
Each of these commodities has a given price per ton.
There’s also an indicator as to whether this
particular port wants these goods (Demand) or has an
excess they’d like to sell (Supply). You can
also see how many tons the port wants to buy or sell,
but remember, you can only trade the amount your ships
can carry. One other thing you’ll notice when
you play the game is that any given ship can only
trade with one port and carry only one commodity.
That’s a bit limiting, but the game could get quite
complex otherwise. You can, however, have
several ships on the water at one time, each trading a
different commodity with a different port.
The game-play consists of moving between the various
screens, buying and selling commodities, making sure
your people are fed, making sure your workers have
tools, and otherwise administering your city-state.
Eventually, you’ll either succeed in building your
pyramid and take your rightful place with your
ancestors in the after-life, or you’ll run out of
money, starve your people, or otherwise mess up, and
your image will be scraped off the walls and you’ll be
forgotten for eternity. So get to work Pharaoh,
your after-life depends on you.
On the "Easy" level Ra is
HELP SUPPORT
constantly popping up with helpful hints and notices.
On higher levels, he only appears when there’s
something you need to know about; something you need
to deal with right away. On the "Impossible"
level, you’ll get no help or warnings at all. If
you do run into problems, trisystech has
a forum dedicated to Giza where you can get help.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Giza runs on ARM/XScale processors under Pocket PC
2002, Windows Mobile 2003, and Windows Mobile 2003,
Second Edition (but without landscape orientation
support). It requires 4MB of storage memory to
install and
7.74MB of program memory to run.
BUGS AND WISHES
Giza exhibited no bugs or errors during my testing.
The program remained quick and responsive throughout.
As with all simulation style games, the authors always
have to decide how much realism to build into the
situation engine. In Giza’s case, they decided
not to allow a more typical trading voyage where you
might pick up several commodities at each port as well
as trade several, eventually obtaining the goods you
want to return to your home port with. I
understand the reason why this level of complexity
wasn’t included in the game, but it might be nice to
have that option on the higher levels of difficulty.
The only other issue I had with the game is that it allows
only one saved game. That means you can’t have
more than one person playing Pharaoh at one time, nor
can you save your game at several points throughout to
go back and see what might happen if you did something
a bit differently. I’d like to see the option of
multiple saved games added to a future version.
PURCHASING
You can purchase Giza
from the pocketnow Store for $9.95. There
is also a
trial version
which will let you play the game, but not for the full
75 years that the full version does.
PROS
- Challenges
your mind, not just your reflexes - Can pause
and can save the current game - Works in
WM2003SE (but not in landscape mode)
CONS
- Only
visits one port each trip - Only ships
one commodity each trip - Only saves
one game at a time
Giza isn’t the type of
OVERALL
IMPRESSION
game you’ll pull up for a few quick moments while
waiting in a check-out line. You’ll want to
spend more time with it than that. It is the
type of game that you can spend 15 or 20 minutes at a
time building your empire a bit at a time or one that
you can spend a whole night on the couch with.
As someone who’s eye-hand
coordination is well within the "lacking" area, I
always appreciate games that provide a challenge for
the quick of mind, not just the quick of hand.
Giza makes you think on a number of levels: You
have to determine how fast to allow your population to
expand while keeping them fed. You need to
figure out how fast to build your fleet of ships to
allow you to trade quickly, but still have cash-flow.
You also have to figure out which commodities to trade
in order to maximize your profit to get the tools and
ships you need. Giza doesn’t have the complexity
of "Aeon of Discovery," another trisystech simulation
game, but it does provide a though-provoking game-play
that will keep you entertained for quite some time;
all at a very reasonable price as well.
All screenshots in this
review are taken using
SOTI’s Pocket Controller Pro
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