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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Three Of A Kind

Impression Games have hit the big time over the last few years with their ancient world city building sims, bringing us the Caesar trilogy set in classical Rome, and more recently the Egyptian flavoured Pharaoh. Currently they are working on "Zeus", applying the winning formula to ancient Greece. Lead designer Chris Beatrice explained that "when I think of ancient, classical civilizations, I always come back to the "big three" - Rome, Greece, and Egypt. Each has its own distinct character, of course, and I knew that eventually we would cover them all."

Zeus isn't just more of the same though, as Chris explained in an interview with GameSpy. "With Zeus we're emphasizing the mythology and the role of gods and heroes, partly because, quite frankly, that's what's cool. We all remember learning about Hercules or watching Clash of the Titans as kids. Also, we want to distinguish the setting from that of Caesar III, because we've already done the "classical" city builder in that title."