Discover the world of Marco Polo - even on a 386! You become a 13th
century merchant who must balance profits, hire security and accept
quests while traveling around europe and asia. Marco polo offers hours
of gameplay with 63 towns to visit, 334
different trading missions along with 2000 digitized images and
extensive video footage to represent 13th century life.
If this game will not run on your multimedia computer, you have a serious
problem on your hands... it only needs a 386 DX 33, 4 MB of RAM (575K
free conventional), a 1x CD-ROM, a 256k VGA card, and a SoundBlaster
Compatible sound card. With a little
tweaking on the conventional memory, it will run under OS/2 without any
trouble - even running in a DOS window on the desktop. There should be
no trouble with this game under Windows95; however, there does not appear
to be an autoload feature, which
would have been a nice addition since the game is rated for ages 6+.
This is good educational title for learning about the history surrounding
Marco Polo (no surprises there!) The graphics are less than exceptional,
using a lot of 320x200, 256 color still screens to tell the story. The
premise appears to have sprung
from a revamped Oregon Trail style plot. Now, there's
nothing wrong with this approach, and it has been done rather well here,
with trading complexities such as haggling, and choosing what to buy and
sell at which city to make the
best profit. Marco Polo does feel rather like a CD-I game that Phillips
moved over to the PC platform, but that is fine for the genre this game
falls into. Marco Polo is not overflowing with vivid images for the
multimedia freaks, but it is a solid
title for anyone interested in Marco Polo. There are literally hours of
narrated slideshow sequences which are very interesting hidden under the
heading Documentation .
A 1x CD-ROM, 320x200 256color stills, and 160x120 video clips. This game was never meant to be graphically impressive.Graphics : 7/25
It would have helped to have a short tutorial or instruction manual, but is not too hard to figure out. The control is fairly logical for an adventure/merchant style game.
Marco Polo certainly has the potential to be played many times over, and still find new twists.
Is there a Unix version?...no? Ok, doc one on compatibility! It should run fine on _any_ DOS machine which meets the minimum requirements.
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