Medieval 2 Total War Mobile
Dwaine Hawke
One of our most-played mobile games continues to be the fantastic port of Rome: Total War, as well as its spin-offs Barbarian Invasion and Alexander. The team which brought that to mobile as well as ports of Tropico and XCOM 2, Feral Interactive, has returned to the Total War series for its next port.
You'll be able to download the title sometime in Spring 2022, according to the developer. Based on past form, we wouldn't be totally surprised if the game released on one operating system before the other, but we generally don't see exclusives from Feral's ports.
This game looks fun, but what's arguably the bigger news is that clearly Feral didn't stop with Rome: Total War, and is working to bring more Total Wars to mobiles over time. However, Medieval II wouldn't be our first choice if we had to guess which were coming.
Total War: Medieval II was the next game made by Creative Assembly (Total War's developers) after Rome, so it follows that it'd be the next title to port, but unless Feral is going to bring every single Total War game to mobile, we think it's an odd choice.
Firstly there's the reception to each game: on Metacritic (admittedly a hugely ropey way of comparing popularity), Medieval II is one of the few classic Total War games sitting at a sub-90 score, with 88 (which is still impressively high).
But more importantly, both Medieval II and Rome are quite similar gameplay-wise, even for Total War games: in the grand scheme of things the time periods they're based on aren't that far removed chronologically, and war wasn't that different.
But it's possible these similarities are what makes Medieval II an easy port: the map is pretty similar to Rome (though much bigger) and Feral doesn't need to work out a way to bring guns and ability-toting characters to battles.
So the choice to port Medieval II makes sense, and we're far from disappointed - we'll definitely be sinking loads of hours into it when it comes out. We're just surprised another game like Empire (this writers' favorite) or Shogun 2 (one of fans' favorites) wasn't chosen first.
Tom Bedford was deputy phones editor on TechRadar until late 2022, having worked his way up from staff writer. Though he specialized in phones and tablets, he also took on other tech like electric scooters, smartwatches, fitness, mobile gaming and more. He is based in London, UK and now works for the entertainment site What To Watch.\n\nHe graduated in American Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Prior to working on TechRadar, he freelanced in tech, gaming and entertainment, and also spent many years working as a mixologist."}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Tom BedfordSocial Links NavigationContributorTom Bedford was deputy phones editor on TechRadar until late 2022, having worked his way up from staff writer. Though he specialized in phones and tablets, he also took on other tech like electric scooters, smartwatches, fitness, mobile gaming and more. He is based in London, UK and now works for the entertainment site What To Watch.
He graduated in American Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Prior to working on TechRadar, he freelanced in tech, gaming and entertainment, and also spent many years working as a mixologist.
Given this, why write about them in fiction? One very simple reason is that I was bored with writing standard academic prose and thought it would be fun to try out a different mode. Although nobody ever admits it, and it is often crushed to invisibility under the other feelings (such as despair) that the act of writing generates, fun is a legitimate motive in academic writing.
Beyond this, fictional narrative is increasingly common in archaeology. Almost without exception, it is used to 'give the past faces', to humanise it, to make us think about what it was like to live as a particular kind of person at a particular historical moment. Done well, it can give us a way to make the past personal and compelling and to explore alternative voices (Van Helden and Witcher 2020; Elphinstone and Wickham-Jones 2012). This is not that kind of fiction. It is about ideas, not about characters. Rather strangely for a historical meditation, it is set in the future; the future provides a bridge to understanding our present and our past. It traces its lineage not to historical fiction but to science fiction, mostly to the playful, sometimes dark, thought-experiment stories of writers such as Stanislaw Lem (Imaginary Magnitude, The Cyberiad, The Star Diaries).
Fiction allows exploration in ways expository prose does not, and this goes for ideas as much as for human experience. Unlike most of the writing we do, this piece is unencumbered by the obligation to present research results; it can wander through a landscape of ideas. Indeed, in many ways, the really important stories in human life are too big to see empirically. They certainly go beyond what any research project could actually tackle. Instead, their only true literary genre may be the philosophical statement of 'the world as I see it'. Yet, inevitably, we write such essays in the present, seeing the story in media res; by definition, any idea big enough to be worth thinking about always projects beyond us into the future; it is always unfinished and ongoing. From where we stand, nobody, however learned, however large their research grant is and however many footnotes hang off their essays, really knows how they will turn out. It is hard to read a newspaper from fifty or a hundred years ago without noticing how many things they used to think were important, and how many of the real changes they didn't see coming. Will today's end of the world turn out to be tomorrow's tempest in a teacup? What currently unthinkable place will the winds of change blow us to? I could have equally well written up the ideas in this piece as a philosophical essay, but that would merely have radiated an artificial and unwarranted sense of certainty about the future; it would have focused attention on whether various futurological visions were likely to be correct, rather than upon the general evolution of human-thing relations. It would not have fundamentally changed anything about its epistemological status, except perhaps for making it less clear. Perhaps this is why there is a long tradition of philosophical fiction, from Plato's dialogues through Thomas More's Utopia and its innumerable 17th-19th century descendants (cf. Guadalupe and Manguel 1987) up to modern thinkers such as B.F. Skinner (Walden 2) and Ursula Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness).
Thank you for inviting me to address you today. It is always a pleasure to speak to the Material Culture Network's annual plenary meeting. Though such big conferences are now rarely held, it is a pleasure to see scholars in our field get together once a year for such an occasion, which in its very form remains a homage to history, a period event, much like reperforming a Greek tragedy or a 20th-century political debate in its original form.
My subject today is the role of the mobile phone in late medieval culture, a topic which has, strangely, been overlooked by material culture theorists exploring the roots of modern civilisation. Every schoolchild nowadays is familiar with the mobile phone's role in the Digital Unification Event, but only as a waypoint in a canned, teleological history of the ascent from primordial invertebrates awash in ancient seas through dinosaurs, primitive hominids, the inseparable splendour and barbarity of the medieval world, and finally ourselves. Such comic-book narratives mask much more than they reveal. The reality is much more interesting.
The Digital Unification Event, like all historical transformations, was of course not an event, but a process. Historical consensus has recognised this, rechristening it the 'Digital Unification Horizon' (often abbreviated as 'DUH'). The DUH was based on the assumption that, ultimately, almost everything can be reduced to information, or at least, somewhat neo-Platonically, that the information in everything can be sifted out from its matter. Technologically, it involved the reduction of formerly separate media such as pictures, music, and text into digital forms that could be stored, accessed and circulated by the same universal devices. It really does not matter, for our theme today, whether it was ushered in by the famous Nokkung EveryByte, or by the ultra-portable, high-powered Sony eCrumb and Apple iCore. These phone-based devices, with their somewhat culinary names, fed users all the data they could consume. It is no surprise that it was the mobile phone which evolved into the first Universal Device. (Contemporary chroniclers and early Modern historians often referred to these objects as 'gadgets' or 'gizmos', but the pejorative and belittling nature of these terms has since been recognised; indeed, their derogatory connotations themselves reflect the social tensions of that time. 'Device' is now widely adopted as a politically neutral form of reference.) The mobile phone outstripped all other candidates (including the printed and written page, the computer, the CD player, the camera, the wristwatch, the GPS, the credit card, the cardiometer, blood-pressure meter, and thermometer, those short-lived and abortive text readers such as the Amazon Kindle, the programmable vacuum cleaner, and the electronic contraceptive). The phone's portability and status as an individual's personal companion clinched the issue. The flush of rather ad hoc 'apps' that initially extended the phone into these other devices' territory was rapidly supplanted by centralised and streamlined devices which made such integration simply taken for granted. A few decades into the 21st century, the mobile phone rapidly became the universal device.
What is really of interest to the student of material culture are the social consequences. Many of the initial effects were highly predictable. For example, as soon as mobile phones became the universal device, many national governments instituted deprivation of these devices (or 'byte-stripping') as a legal punishment equivalent to imprisonment, disenfranchisement or mutilation. And then there were the quite violent anti-device riots held by reactionary groups. These picturesque events, with their evangelical songs, archaic costumes and bonfires of electronic gear, were ironically themselves possible only through the use of devices such as electronically wired trucks and lighters. Indeed, studies of electronic traffic archives have recently shown how anti-device demonstrations were almost always actually organised via the Internet, even if the social elements involved insisted that the Bible warranted only the use of 'email classic' and text-messaging rather than instant blogfeeds (or 'blitter' made up of 'bleats'), simulpods and electronic delegation. Some devices, it would seem, are holier than others! Counter-arguments mounted by scholars in the rabbinical tradition that the Talmud and its commentaries provide a divine sanction for hypertext are particularly fascinating.
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