The castle is surely one of the most stupid housing ideas in the world. They're cold, draughty, unhygienic and take years to build.
And then hundreds of years later, they fall to pieces and American tourists come and trample them to the ground in their loud Hawaiian shirts and take pictures of all the rubble because it's "quaint".
No, castles are not high on my list of great places to live. But here comes a game that promises to recreate the fun and excitement of building a castle, or three. All the joys of laboriously dragging huge chunks of stone across the country to construct a big, smelly castle.

In fact, I think the only reason people lived in castles was because they took so long to build that they had to live in them, or they'd have wasted half their lives building very big and heavy garden sheds.

So, can you make an exciting game out of such a dubiously entertaining subject? Well, almost. Naturally the rather sedate pace of such a task is going to startle the hardcore shoot-'emup junkie, so if you feel that applies to you then go and paint your toenails or something.
On the other hand, if you're a more laid back kinda person who likes to ponder over problems and stroke your chin in a thoughtful, Jimmy Hill-type way, then stick around and we'll get stuck into Castles.

You just design the castle, making sure you stick loads of walls in for no good reason all over the place and silly towers just for a laugh, hire some peasants to actually build the thing for you, tell them which bit to start work on and leave them to it.
When they've finished, tell them to start work on another bit. And if you don't build the walls at the same rate, they become unstable and the whole thing crumbles to the ground. Not particularly tricky, and to be honest, it's too long-winded to be any fun either.

So, just to keep your regal mouse button a-clicking, there are a profusion of other kingly tasks for you to turn your attention to.
Recruiting and maintaining an army in case of an attack is always important. Keeping a close eye on your spending should prevent you running out of readies, and if by some stupidity you do run low (ahem, like I did) then just up the tax rate and take it from the little people.
And every now and then, you'll be approached by one of your subjects asking for some divine advice from your good self.

So Ethelred the Obscene has been bothering livestock again, has he? Will you let him off? Will you send some knights round to give him a kicking? Or will you have some of his more tender organs removed with a large axe? Decisions, eh?

Everyone knows that a good medieval king just chopped everyone up, and it's pretty good fun bellowing "off with his doodahs!" at the monitor.
You don't just make decisions concerning the private functions of your more dubious peasants, either. You could become embroiled in a scrap between two feuding dukes or something and have to prevent a Civil War. Or you may be approached by a rival king who offers a truce. Do you trust him, or do you chop his head off? Exactly! You're getting the hand of it already.

All the while, just keep an eye on how the castle's coming along. Give the little fellas a holiday now and again, make sure their pay is just enough for a scabby loaf of bread and some dead pig, and they'll be as happy as Larry Whoever Larry is.

Inevitably, you'll come under attack and be forced to defend your half-built homestead. This is where the army comes in. Strangely enough.
You'll be given ample warning of where the enemy are attacking from, and then you get to arrange your archers in the towers of the castle, and along the walls, and set your infantry facing the enemy. When they're in sight, click on the infantry and watch them scuttle off to get beaten up while the archers do all the work and kill the enemy from afar.
If the enemy get close enough, they'll start to topple the walls and undo all your hard work.

The enemy also have another rather fiendish contraption. It's like a big tent on wheels full of dead pigs and stuff. They wheel it up to a part of your castle, usually one of the supporting towers, and then all the gas that builds up inside the pigs as they rot explodes and the wall collapses covered in bits of big. Very tasty. Who said chivalry was dead, eh?

After the battle, providing it wasn't a complete massacre, you start to repair the damage and mutter under your breath about what those dastardly Celts can do with their battleaxes.
And so it goes on until you've finished your castle, at which point you get to go to bed with a nice mug of Old Rumble's Gut Rot Real Ale and have a snooze in your new house. Probably (I couldn't actually finish my castle without running out of money).

Time to change into my Criticism Hat now, for a bit of nit-picking. First of all, it's slow. Not slow in a "badly programmed" sort of way, but slow in a "sit watching for 15 minutes while some stick men slowly build a wall" sort of way.
This means that it takes absolutely ages to build a proper castle, as they're usually made up of about 50 or so sections. Plus, and this really annoyed me, the manual doesn't actually contain instructions as such.

It tells you what to do in the form of a waffly tutorial about some king or other being told how to play Castles by one of his chums. Very funny (not!) and very useful (double not!). This meant that for ages I was watching absolutely nothing happen and I had no idea why.
A simple step-by-step list of instructions would have made it so much clearer, but instead you have to wade through endless crap medieval puns to find out where you're going wrong.

Other niggles are the jerky scrolling, which makes the combat a real drag to watch and control, and the fact that it's sometimes hard to tell whether or not you actually did click on the options.
Some nice clear icons wouldn't have gone amiss. Still, even after these gripes, I quite enjoyed playing Castles. But it took a while. Let's just say that if you're looking for an instantly appealing game then you should run away from this screaming.
But if you like a bit of strategy with some building site-type bits bolted on, and you can ignore the sloth-like pace of it all, then this may suit you.

All in all, a nice idea that just doesn't work in the long run.

For a moment, imagine you're a lord of the manor, in the 12th Century and you are looking for somewhere to live. Do you choose: a) a small brick building on the outskirts of a village, replete with your own privy, or b) a sodding great brick building which virtually is a village, replete with en suite privies in every chamber?

Castles begins just after you've chosen b). To wit: you must design, build and ultimately defend your own castle.

The designing bit is easy. Having chosen a suitable bit of land, you're presented with a plan view upon which you can lay various components of the castle: towers, wall segments (of varying thicknesses) and of course a gate. The only restriction is that you can't change a wall's direction without sticking a tower to support it.

New castle
Once your design is OK, you need to hire some labour. There are seven categories of labourer available, such as diggers and masons, and it's down to you to hire the right mix of workers to get the castle cracking. They're all important in their own way.

Next you need to assign each section of your blueprint a number of labourers. Then off they trundle, collecting raw materials, sawing wood, breaking stone and lo and behold, there in the 3D view, your castle begins to grow.

There's another problem here. It's impossible to build a wall segment more than four-feet taller than either of its adjacent segments, because it just won't stand up. Thus is you start building mid-wall the workers will soon stop with the message "Unstable", forcing you to build up the side segments before you can continue. While all this is going on it's wise to hire some military - because sooner or later your prize castle is going to be attacked. There are two sorts of military, archers and infantry, and they need training if they're going to be any good in battle. Food, too, is a good buy. If you're sieged by the enemy, a good scran is a damn handy thing to have about. Bear in mind, though, that it's far cheaper just after the harvest and very expensive in the spring.

You don't get anything for free: your labourers need wages, as do the military, on top of the food and supply costs. Your only source of income is taxing your subjects; if you're short, you can bump up the rate, but then there's the risk of having a mob of peasants coming round to, er, complain. You can always contact your treasurer for advice.
Advice is available, on how you stand with the plebs, from Sir Richard of Westhampton, a reliable man who tells it like it is.

Roy castle
Just as your castle is coming along nicely you're attacked. By what depends on whether you chose to play the game in the real world, in which case it's usually berserk Celts, or in a fantasy world, when it's generally ogres. Either way you have a limited time to arrange your military around your castle before the onslaught. Each unit attacks the enemy closest to it, though you can direct them otherwise. If the enemy manages to reach the castle and destroy enough of it, it's literally back to the drawing board.

Occasionally you receive a messenger with news of happenings in other parts of the kingdom, and a request. For example, you might be told that Sir Richard of Norshire has completely ballsed up in battle again, and then you're given the choice of "sacking" him, sending him some money or ignoring him. Your decisions here affect your popularity with both the peasants and the church.

Once the castle is finished and you've fought off several thousand rampant nasties, the level is complete and it's off to the next area.

Caernarfon castle
Castles is a good example of how to make what is on paper a thoroughly dull concept come alive in practice. Designing castles is great fun on its own, but watching while they're built is almost mesmerising. The graphics and character animations are actually quite primitive, but when enough men are working away on screen at once, you really get a feeling of business. The messenger screens gradually add an element of medieval soap opera to proceedings as you follow the fortunes of your subjects, and the enemy's attacks are spaced far enough apart not to be annoying - unlike the music.

Sometimes the game becomes a little plodding when there's not much going on but castle building. You will need to set aside a couple of hours to play it properly, even with the save function. But on the whole Castles is innovative, well-designed, fun and built to last, in that order. Unlike en suite privies.

So we have had (or are about to have) city sims, global sims, even ant colony sims. Winding the clock abck 700 years or so for an Englishman's-home sim seems like such an obvious idea it is a wonder nobody thought of it a long time ago. Imagine it, designing your own medieval stronghold, lording it over the peasants, covering attackers in boiling oil. Ah, the life of an oppressive, sadistic, peasant-bashing feudal baron is the one for me.

Well, Interplay did think of it a while back, as Castles has been around on the PC for some months now. Now out on the Amgia, it offers the challenge of ruling a kingdom and building and defending your own stone castles. The simulation model is based on the castles built on by King Edward I (reigned 1272-1307) to consolidate the kingdom's hold on those wild Celtic devolutionists, the Welsh.

I say 'based on' the 'real world' scenario is of a fictionalized medieval Albion, packed with all kinds of dubious characters who carry a sort of sub-plot to the main exercise of castle building in an attempt to give the otherwise mundane stone-stacking a storyline. And for those with weirder or wilder tastes, there is a fantasy world option featuring dragons, trolls and wizards too.

So how does it work? Well, to start with you can build either a single castle or conduct a campaign to subjugate the Celts by building a series of eight. While you are doing this, other factors are thrown into the pot such as attacks by berserk Celts, knights popping up to report on distant battles, annoying bishops hassling you for a game of chess - the usual petty trials of castle ownership. At least there is a dungeon handy for double glazing salesmen.

So, to building. Four levels of play are offered, each of which presents a different scale of resources. Such considerations as the convenience of local stone quarries; how much money you can raise through taxation; and the availability of labour serve to give the impresssion that building a castle takes a good deal more thought than knocking up a garden shed.

The main screen shows the local terrain and it is up to you to decide whereabouts to build. You cannot go building on rock, in forests (very ecological, I am sure) or, for obvious reasons, in a swamp. The best option here is to look and see if there is a convenient body of water handy, and, if there is, to build near it, thus limiting the number of directions from which an enemy can approach.

Next, it is time to lay out the foundations. There are two types of tower to choose from - square and the more difficult to undermine round tower - plus the facility to specify height and whether or not to have windows. To plan out your castle, you select the appropriate tower and paste it on the map several times to form the outline of whatever shape you want. Be careful though. If you get carried away and start mapping out a small city, your resources will rapidly dwindle, leaving no scope left for those most useful of defensive devices, walls.

Wall segments come in thicknesses of nine or twelve feet and, again, their heights can be specified. You can also include arrow slits and cauldrons (simmer oil at gas mark 6 for three hours), just to make the lives of any aggressors that bit more miserable. Finally, it might be nice to have a gate - getting in and out can be tough without one.

And there we have it. An impressive fortification standing all of about four-feet high. Not too good at keeping out the draughts really, so it is off to the Labour menu to hire some workers to build it up a bit. The size of the workforce depends on how much dosh you are raising from taxation (egad, sir, you mean to pay them?) - fork out too much on wages and they will all bog off when the money runs out. You can allocate work teams to parts of the castle, then sit back and watch as the little figures on-screen slowly start to build it up. And boy, is it ever slow. Things get really tedious as wall sections and towers gradually take shape, but - presumably in a bid to keep you awake - attacking bands of utterly anti-social types come wandering along regularly.

UNDER ATTACK - MEDIEVAL DEAD
Suddenly you are thrust into battle. The workforce has run off and the marauders come and knock down everything they have built. Damn, I knew that Military menu was there for a reason. You can hire an army of foot soldiers and archers, the size of which depends on how many components there are to your castle. Of course, they will need paying and training, so there is yet more financial juggling to take care of. In battle, your faithful fighting units (a maximum of 20) are deployed in the same way as castle components are placed and, once given a target to attack, pretty well conduct the fight themselves. Hum. Do I really need to be here or would the computer have more fun on its own?

At least there are the visitors to keep me amused while the game plays with itself. In the fantasy scenario. Battered and bleeding knights arrive with dark warnings of savage troll armies on the move, and you are presented with a choice of answers: ignore them, send troops or form an alliance with the Celts. Decisions made earlier in the game supposedly affect how the story develops, but you know it will all end up with an army having a go at your castle so you may as well say 'nay' to messengers on the game options screen.

While it all sounds quite jolly, and while the sight of your castle design taking shape is fun, it can get rather boring. The battle scenes are more of an intrusion than an exciting aside, for the simple reason that they are not very dramatic. The pace at which the workers do their thing is somewhat snail-like too, and it is a tedious business having to manually relocate manpower every time a section of the castle is finished - haven these guys never heard of initiative?

But my main gripe is that, in trying to offer something a little lighter and more action-orientated, a lot of potential has been overlooked. A greater variety of military units - such as the inclusion of cavalry - would have been nice, and more fortification options should really be here. Sure, you can dig a moat, but that is the only earthwork on offer.

Castles as a sim is not very realistic and as a game verges on the tedious. There are some thrills to be had, but the ease with which an enemy can slight what you have spent hours putting together makes you wonder what the point of building it was in the first place. This is a game with plenty of potential, but too little of it seem to have been realised. I am sure oppressive, sadistic, peasant-bashing feudal barons used to have much more fun.