And that's exactly what you will do. Emperor is like the movie version of a '60s TV show. It's bigger, brassier, full of great effects, but you know you've seen it before.

It's not that there's anything bad about the game. In fact, just about everything about it is extremely good. This game is exactly what you would expect after letting the Westwood team loose with the latest graphics tools and a tried and tested gameplay formula. No less and, sadly, no more.

The premise of the game is as follows. After the last battle for Arrakis (the planet better known as Dune), the Emperor reigned in peace for a while. But all good things come to an end. The Emperor was assassinated and now the empire is in turmoil again as the three big Houses battle to ascend to the throne and become Emperor. Rather than let the universe be completely trashed by war, the all-powerful Guild of Navigators, who enable inter-planetary travel, decide they will let the Houses battle it out on Dune once again in a 'limited war'. Interesting choice of location since Dune is where the all-important spice Melange is found and harvested. The spice gives the navigators the psychic powers that allow them to navigate.

Still - that's their decision. So the three Houses battle for control of Dune, control of the spice, and control of the empire.

There are three campaigns in the game - one for each of the three Houses fighting for control of Dune. These Houses are the 'noble' Atreides, the 'evil' Harkonnen, and the 'insidious' Ordos. You assume the role of general of whichever side you choose to play.

Needless to say the different Houses have different units. The Harkonnen have evil units like Buzzsaws, which are a cross between a motorbike and something out of a Mitre 10 catalog. They chop infantry up. Ah, the Harkonnen are truly evil!

The Ordos have insidious units, like Saboteurs and Deviators. Deviators use mind-controlling posion gas to turn units to the Ordos side. Is there no end to their insidiousness?!!

Meanwhile, the Atreides have noble units like Ornithopters, which are wing-flapping light planes that fire missiles and blow people up. Kinda noble in the same way that a Stuka dive bomber or V2 rocket is noble.

The campaigns unfold with very well-put together, and pretty well-acted cinematic cutscenes. The cutscenes develop the story and describe important background events like big treacheries, new alliances and so on.

The missions themselves follow the standard basic RTS formula. You start out with a handful of units and set about constructing a base. You can only build on the rocky outcroppings, not on the sand. Fairly early on in the piece you will need to build a spice refinery, at which point a harvester and a flying carry-all, which ferries the harvester round, will start automatically gathering and selling spice for you. You will need to keep half an eye on the harvesters, mostly to replace the ones that get destroyed, but by and large resource gathering takes care of itself. The spice never actually runs out. You may exhaust one spice field, but new 'spice blooms' bubble up from under the sand from time to time so it's business as usual, just in a different part of the map.

The reason the spice regenerates is because the map is crawling with vast sand worms. If you've ever read Frank Herbert's book Dune, you will know that the spice is basically worm poo. But that's not important. What is important is that the worms don't like people messing with their s**t. So, from time to time you will hear the ominous warning "Worm sign", then a large tubular writhing thing will spring up from under the desert like a rogue industrial vaccuum cleaner and eat whatever troops and vehicles it can, if they can't run to the safety of a rock outcropping first.

Worms are not the only environmental hazard. There are also regular sand storms which spring up and move randomly around the map. They are very impressive to watch. They do moderate damage to buildings and vehicles, but it's great to see them pass over a group of infantry. The men scream as they are picked up and flung round in the spout like the cows in the movie Twister. As they are lifted up the spout they get bigger. It's actually quite cool. Less so if they're your troops, of course.

Emperor's most ground-breaking achievement is in the graphics department. No two ways about it, this game looks good.

The units are all rendered in 3D - yet despite this, they look just as good and detailed as 2D painted sprites, without the clumsy blockiness of earlier 3D titles. The animations are very smooth, and well-executed details like shadows and headlights add to the impressive appearance of the game.

The unit design is great too, with a slightly camp, retro and over-the-top feel that is quite true to David Lynch's 1984 movie version, and other sci-fi movies of the period like Flash Gordon. The 3D units look great. The 3D weapons effects are fantastic. The 3D landscape is ... hilly. And clearly this is very important for strategic things like line of sight, cover, shooting distances and so on. And, if you really feel you must, you can rotate the camera around to get a better look at all this great graphical stuff.

Ultimately, the classic RTS is an action game. It's fast-paced, it's full of frantic clicking and issuing rapid orders to dozens of units. The last thing you want to be worrying about is which way is up.

The great thing about the 2D RTS isometric perspective is you always know where you are, which direction home is, and which direction to point your tank-rush. If you're twisting your camera view round all over the place you can rapidly lose track of where you're going -especially on maps that have very few distinguishing features. One patch of sand looks much like the next.