Full update notes can be found at the bottom of this page.
It’s been a while since the database was updated, but here we are again! As teased in the last update, this one has a particular theme. This is the official Asterix update, where we add the many games of the Asterix franchise that have been developed and published over the last forty years, inspired by the famous comic books (and subsequent films) by the French duo René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo. For those who are unfamiliar with the story: the town of Asterix (and his strong friend Obelix) is the only town in Gaul to have been able to consistently defeat Julius Caesar and therefore keep themselves from being subjected to the power of Rome. They’re able to do so by the help of a magical potion created by the village druid Panoramix (or Getafix, in the English translations), which increases their strength and allows them to fight off the Romans. All of the Asterix games are marked with a dagger (†), since they engage with classical antiquity (Caesar, not suprisingly, frequently pops up as a villain) but aren’t set in either Greece or Rome (much like Assassin’s Creed Origins, for example).
If anything, the more than thirty Asterix games that I’ve found (I’m very grateful to Jordy Orellana F. for his invaluable help with this!) show the constant and persistent attraction of this story. New Asterix games are still being made, with an upcoming game called Asterix & Obelix: Slap Them All! releasing this November. The variety of these Asterix games is also striking: some of the early ones are more or less direct allusions to the Mario games by Nintendo, others are often party games, and one of the most recent ones, Asterix & Obelix: Vidi Vici, is an augmented reality game, much like Pokémon Go. So if you’ve ever wanted to go for a walk and fight Roman soldiers on the street, you actually can!
Again, there’s been some very interesting releases in the last few months. Old World moved from early access and was released officially on July 1st, and on August 17th a new 4X strategy game called Humankind saw the light of day. While not exactly the “Civ killer” it had been described to be, Humankind was generally received rather positively. My personal favorite was The Forgotten City, a time travel game where the player travels to a forgotten Roman city and is tasked with preventing the death of all of its inhabitants. What’s interesting is that The Forgotten City actually started out years ago as a highly popular mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and it even won an Australian Writers Guild Award in 2016. The game now stands on its own and it has already been described as a possible Game of the Year contender.
This update adds 56 new games to the database (33 of which are related to Asterix), which brings the total amount of games included on Paizomen over the 300 milestone, to 315. As always, if you know of any other games that I’ve missed, send me a message and I’ll happily add them with your name on the game’s page.
I’m also happy to say that we now have our own Discord server! The server was created to further foster the community around historical/antiquity games (or just games in general). I also think this will be a more accessible and overall better environment than the Steam Community Group I created a while back. If you want to join, just follow this link (https://discord.gg/qBnTnnrtcg) and come say hi!
That’s all for now; I hope you like the update! Don’t forget to tune in in the coming weeks, when our first blog posts will be published!
All the best,
Alexander
Click here to see the full extent of the update.
Paizomen 