Battles, Booty and Barbarians

All computer gaming is divided into three parts: arcade games, adventure games and simulations. Of these, simulations generally offer the greatest diversity of play and require the greatest degree of creativity. Arcade games tax your hand-eye coordination, and adventure games promise to stretch your imagination while mostly testing your vocabulary.

There are, of course, variations of those three types, such as Electronic Arts’ “Centurion: Defender of Rome.” The strategy game combines a rather involving simulation of the conquest of the Roman Empire with some silly arcade-type diversions. The tactical elements of the former make “Centurion” worth playing; the latter make it less worthy than a night with a couple of badly dubbed gladiator videos.

In “Centurion,” you play the role of an ambitious military officer subduing barbarians from the Pillars of Hercules to the sands of Arabia (no, this isn’t what you would call topical) and moving up the Roman power structure to the rank of Caesar. You must pacify the hometown crowd with spectacles at the Colosseum and Circus Maximus as you win the hearts and minds of the colonials. And you do all of this on the meager wages of a career warrior and the occasionally generous booty of conquest.

The best parts of “Centurion” are the combat scenes between the Roman legions and the various enemies. Sea battles are slightly less successful.

Land battles are true tactical exercises that require you, as field general, to command a legion’s individual units (called cohorts) of soldiers and cavalry in animated contests against usually worthy computerized opponents. The battles, which grow more complex as the game’s level of difficulty is increased, involve the use of some simplified but standard Roman military maneuvers.

But “Centurion” rises above a conventional war game in the designers’ noble effort to simulate the unexpected, irrational and frustrating elements of combat. War, even from an armchair general’s point of view, is never as neat as the ‘40s movie scenes of Admiralty officers positioning their toy battleships and lead soldiers on huge maps would have had us believe. Even when everything looks to be in your favor, the wrong things just sometimes happen on the field of battle. It can be disheartening--and deadly--to watch the same soldiers who fought so fiercely and bravely in Gaul and Germania routed in Armenia or turn tail in panic in Mesopotamia.

Outside the combat sequences, however, there is little subtlety in “Centurion.” Although you occasionally get to use diplomatic rather than military skills to achieve your short-term goals of taking over a particular region, the game has no real strategy beyond world conquest.

The politics of “Centurion” is absurd, cynical at best. Local populations grow restless or angry under the Roman yoke, but they can be mollified with an arcade-style gladiator contest or a chariot race. Big deal. Where is the palatine intrigue? Where are the Senate allies and enemies? Where are the rivals for the job of ruler of the world?

“Centurion” would be a far better game if the designers had spent as much time learning the Rome of “I, Claudius” as they did “Spartacus.”

One final note: The documentation that comes with “Centurion” is quite poor and includes at least one glaring omission--it does not tell you how to move a legion off ships. (It took a call to the publishers to find out that we had to click the right mouse button.) The organization of the manual and the accompanying command summary card also leave much to be desired.

“Centurion,” published by Electronic Arts of San Mateo, Calif., requires 640K RAM for EGA, VGA or MCGA graphics cards, or 384K for Tandy 16 color systems. The game comes in either 3 1/2-inch or 5 1/4-inch disk versions, and play is best with a mouse. An off-disk copy protection method is used. List price: $49.95.

CENTURION Rating: *** Fair ** Good *** Very Good **** Excellent LETTERS: We welcome letters from readers and game players and will publish some in future columns. Questions, game hints or comments may be about specific games or on topics of general computer entertainment interest. Sorry, but we cannot answer letters privately. Write: Computainment, Calendar, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.