It's been about 4 years since the last time I tried to play Master of Magic.

It's not real easy; you have to have a sound card that can be recognized as one of the major players (adlib, soundblaster, etc) and it needs DOS. real DOS. But, I was putting a computer I got at a yard sale together and saw that it had a Sound Blaster Pro in it and thought, "why not?".

So, I figured I'd do it up right; I downloaded the abandonware version off of the-underdogs.org , installed Dos 6.22, and fired it up.

The graphics have gotten worse. Every game these days has pixel-shaded, bumped, textured EVERYTHING. Master of Magic is blocky 320x240. or worse. the Music was still not TOO bad, but the audio was clunky.

It's actually hard to read the screen, you have to "interpret" what the writing is supposed to be.

That being said: Master of Magic is the best Strategy Game to date. Still. It took about 5 minutes of play before I was not worrying about the graphics or audio; the game drops you into it's world completely and totally.

Whoever REALLY has the license: want to make a few million dollars? give the game modern graphics. keep the sound files, just clean them up. Make it run on win32. don't change ANYTHING ELSE. and you will have the best selling game of the year.