I still remember that in the summer of early 2000, I saved up half a month's breakfast money, ran to the small shop in front of the school, and excitedly took out a crumpled ten yuan note in exchange for a pirated GBA cassette with a blurry cover and a cockroach corpse inside. At that time, the boss would always say mysteriously: "This game can be played for a whole summer vacation!" Then we believed it, and when we went home and plugged in the machine, we found that eight out of ten games were the same reskinned game with a completely wrong name.
However, there was one game among them that really kept me glued to the screen throughout the summer - that was the "Roman Empire" that was randomly introduced in an unknown game. Although the title of the pirated cassette was translated as "Roman Shit Emperor", it did not affect my passion for commanding thousands of troops and conquering cities and territories at all. At that time, I didn't know anything about “cross-server competition”. I only knew how to use cavalry to break down enemy formations on a small screen and brag in front of my neighbors.
Now, I actually encountered the mobile game "Roman Empire" on my mobile phone. The opening scene instantly took me back to the afternoon when I was shaking a broken electric fan and chewing on ice packs. 😭 The Roman Empire on the original GBA only had a few types of soldiers, and the map was only as big as a palm. You had to read and write files constantly to fool yourself that "I am operating an army." The mobile game version is simply amazing - tens of thousands of people in team battles, real-time voice chat, just click on the equipment to install it instantly, and you no longer have to turn on the small switch on the side of the cassette to restart it repeatedly like you did in the past!
Speaking of pirated cassettes, the biggest fear at that time was the loss of saves. Sometimes, when the game is almost unified, I turn off the phone and reinsert the card, returning directly to the original society. There was no "cloud archive" at that time, so I could only ask for God's blessing. Nowadays, the mobile version of the game offers one-click archiving and a gift package for newbies, which feels like a world away. But to be honest, that kind of ritual feeling when the metal contacts of the cassette plugging and unplugging are not in good contact, and you blow your breath and insert it again, it has become the most authentic imprint of youth.
"Roman Empire" has almost perfectly transplanted the tense feeling of "attacking the city and fighting with the last ditch" in the GBA version back then. And with the addition of a strategic formation system, you can really arrange the cavalry, infantry, and archers according to your own ideas, just like the fancy formation pictures on the covers of those pirated cassettes. As I played with it, I even felt that the mobile phone screen in front of me was the dirty GBA SP reflective screen from back then, only it was bigger and clearer now.
Brothers, if you remember those days when you were holding crinkled banknotes to buy pirated cassettes, and you remember the moments when you were confiscated while secretly playing in class, and cried and begged the teacher to return the cassette, then this mobile game "Roman Empire" is definitely worth a try. It is not only a game, but also a time machine leading to that summer of cicadas and backstreet kiosks. 👴
Finally, I want to say that even if I am playing genuine mobile games now, I still have the pirated combined card in my heart. Youth may pass away, but "Rome" will always be there. As long as you click on the game, you will still be the boy who scolded Fang Qiu! 💪