Victoria II: before there was Abba…

Your overall progress in Victoria II is mostly your prestige. In 1839, as Sweden, I get a nice little prestige bump because of that chick up there.

After the jump, the best use of opera in a videogame since Heroes of Might & Magic 2

Here’s the event:

And here’s the reward:

At first, I read that as 2,100 prestige. And I thought Maria Callas was overrated! But like most numbers in a Paradox game, prestige is measured as many as three digits after the decimal point. Leave it to Paradox to be persnickety enough to care about thousandths of a point. Jenny Lind merits a hundred of them over and above the two full points she gives you.

I love these little hardcoded historical nuggets in Paradox’s games. I’ll whinge as loudly as any Paradox fan when it comes to hardcoding the American Civil War and the bankruptcy of the Ottoman Empire. But Jenny Lind every time 1839 rolls around? Bring it!

I looked up Jenny Lind on Wikipedia. The New York Herald suggested she was suited to certain climates. Wikipedia cites a 1946 article from The Music Quarterly:

The American press agreed that Lind’s presentation was more typical of Germanic “cold, untouching, icy purity of tone and style”, rather than the passionate expression necessary for Italian opera, and the Herald wrote that her style was “suited to please the people of our cold climate. She will have triumphs here that would never attend her progress through France or Italy”.