Europa Universalis
By Strategy First
The boys coming by immediately said “Old School” upon seeing the screen. These, of course, are the hopped-up, strung-out and overly stimulated MTV Gen types. “If it don’t grab me in five seconds, it’s not worth it,” says one. The same one who’ll spend all night drinking and displaying nonsensical apopathetic behavior during a baseball game in which there is only fifteen minutes of actual action. Time it sometimes, I did.
Anyhow though the look is reminiscent of some of the “Old School” style the game is anything but that. The gaming area is immense. I never did get a chance to see the entire map during any of my games. That alone is worth the game. Like Cossacks, the game is based on true historical situations except for the Fantasia mode and that was the one I enjoyed the most. It was the one where you could chose to be the Iroquois or Inca Empire. Hot Damn! A game where First Nations are actually counted for more than just a disturbance. I loved it and played both of them. It was a subtle game introducing random historical factors as well as requiring you to make certain money allocations in order to advance in the areas you needed to in order to win the game. You could do well in your area of the world but lose because someone you never met or saw was doing much better. That was ultimately interesting and enjoyable in a strategy game. This had none of the 3D graphics that catch the eye with splashes of colour and explosions as gore drips off of the enemy, but it is captivating nevertheless. I recommend this game to those who hate to master a game in a week or two and then get bored. This requires skill and patience to win.
Taking on the Start Menu
You’ve probably found out by now that Windows 98 is a pain Start menu. Sure, you can pick off items in your Documents menu one-by-one, and you can remove icons from the Programs menu. If you’re looking for real changes, however, you’re out of luck. Don’t sweat it, we have a few neat things to show you.
Put Your Control Panel Into the Start Menu
Want to access the Control Panel quickly by integrating it into your Start menu? No problemos—just connect the dots, er numbers.
1. Right-click the Start button and select Explore from the pop-up menu.
2. Click the right pane of the Exploring window and select New/Folder from the File pull-down menu.
3. Enter “Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}” as the folders name (without the quotes).
4. Press the Enter key after naming the folder; it should
appear simply as “Control Panel.”
Now you can access your Control Panel settings from the Start menu shortcut.
Check Your Browser History From the Start Menu
If you liked adding your Control Panel to the Start menu, here’s another. You can also access your or your significant other’s Web page History (what have they been accessing?) from your Start menu.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Right-click the Start button and select Explore from the pop-up menu.
2. Click the right pane of the Exploring window and select New/Folder from the File pull-down menu.
3. Type “Web History.{ff393560-C2A7-l 1CF-BFF4-444553540000}” as the folder’s name (again, without the quotes).
4. Press the Enter key and a folder called Web History should appear.
You can then access your browsing history from the Start menu shortcut, categorized by date. None of us are safe again until I teach you how to delete Web History selectively.
Edit the Documents Menu
There’s a danger in assuming you can completely delete your old documents without a US Dept. Of Defense Hard Drive Shredder Pgm. In most cases you don’t need to do that but you might want to remove lines from the Start menu’s Documents listing detailing what you have been recently working on. The simplest way is to right-click a Documents item and select Delete. But to disable the feature so that no recent documents ever show up in the Start menu, you need to play the Registry like this:
1. Back up the Registry.
2. Launch RegEdit. (Select Start/Run, type in regedit, then hit Enter.)
3. Under HKEY CURRENT USER, select Software/ Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/Explorer.
4. In the right hand pane, double-click NoRecentDocsHistory. If there is no such value, create a new binary value with that name (select Edit/New/Binary Value).
5. Edit 00,00,00,00 to read 01,00,00,00.
6. Locate or create the NoRecentDocsMenu value.
7. Edit 00,00,00,00 to read 01,00,00,00 there, too.
8. Save your changes as you quit RegEdit and restart Windows.
Warning: Changing the Registry is risky; you’re taking your system into your own hands. To be safe, manually back up the Registry before you make any changes.
