Sure, at the start of a settlement they'd be slinging bowls of steamed cabbage and meat-slice soup - nothing to write home about. And what chefs my little imaginary citygoers were!

And brilliantly, if you clicked on the market, it would tell you what was on the menu on any given day, based on what ingredients were available. Like most of its ilk, of course, the game tasked you with keeping your citizens fed, by either harvesting or importing din-dins, and then distributing them through housing districts from a market. But these retrospectives are short, fleeting things, and so I want to focus on one particular facet of nostalgia: the fact that every time I go back to replay Emperor, it makes me really, really hungry. I could go into great detail about all the various ways in which E:ROTMK refined the Impressions formula into something magnificent, with its sweeping progress through thousands of years of Chinese history. Pharaoh will always be my favourite because I'm just so into the theme, but Emperor was by far the better game, and is arguably as good as historical city builders ever got. And every time I mention how good it is, some forlorn soul in the comments mentions Emperor: Rise Of The Middle Kingdom, it's successor-but-one (after Zeus: Master of Olympus) from 2002, as being better. I'm always going on about Pharaoh, the Impressions city builder from 1999 that's lodged itself in my psyche like a toy soldier in an alsatian's paw. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives.

Emperor rise of the middle kingdom