Populous (Amiga)

Developer:

Bullfrog

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Release Date:

1989

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Systems:

It's been on a few

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the legendary god game genre pioneer Populous, by equally legendary developers Bullfrog!

It's one of Bullfrog's earliest games, only the third one they made, which you can tell from that old school frog logo in the bottom left. I don't remember ever seeing that before, but I've played this game so I must have. Unless it was Powermonger that I played... they're pretty similar looking and it's been a while.

One thing I'm sure about is that whatever it is I played, I couldn't figure out how to play it and I turned it off after 10 minutes of frustration. I guess I was too busy not seeing the cute little frog logo that I didn't notice that big 'Tutorial' button over on the right either. This time though things are going to be very different! I'm going to stick with it for at least 20 minutes before giving up in frustration.

Populous started out as an Amiga game and I've always assumed it didn't stray much further, as it seems like the kind of game that would be considered too mouse driven and weird to make it onto consoles. But nope, Populous was ported to absolutely bloody everything. Well, the Acorn Archimedes, Apple Mac, Atari ST, FM Towns, PC-98, MS-DOS PC, IBM PCjr, Sharp X68000, Master System, Mega Drive, SNES, Turbografx-16, Nintendo DS and Game Boy anyway. Makes me wonder what the NES did to be left out.

Just listing all those systems took long enough so please don't expect screenshots of each of them. Or screenshots showing off any actual gameplay either. I can promise you only a title screen and shots of all my little dudes getting wiped out for reasons I can't even comprehend.

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Man, that's a horrific amount of enigmatic little icons that I can click on. I'm starting to see why I had so much trouble with the game first time around, seeing as it has two separate 'drowning' buttons, a telephone button, and ankhs all over the place. It wouldn't be so bad if I could hover the mouse over them to get a description, but this is from way before tooltips became a thing. It's also apparently from the era before tutorials told you a damn thing, as I'm getting absolutely zero text telling me what to do.

I've at least figured out that I can jump around the landscape by clicking on the map in the book, which looks cool by the way. Though I didn't notice it was a book at first because I was too distracted by the mysterious “GC” in the top left corner. What the hell could it mean? I guess the only person who would know for certain is the artist, Glenn Corpes.

There are flashing dots on the map which are either indicating people or their houses, I'm not sure. I'm not even sure whether I'm red team or blue team. The shield on the top is red, but the meter to the left of it is filling up blue and the left side is always the player's in games like this so I don't know.

Ah, I just noticed that the cursor hand has a blue sleeve, so I'm definitely blue. Which sucks, as the little dudes flying the red flags are doing way better. They've been busy building castles while my guys are still building huts.

Fortunately the folks living in this world are a little brighter than lemmings, so I don't have to babysit any of my blue people. Not that I even could, as I can't control any of them directly or give them jobs to do. They just wander around on their own, and if they find a spot they like they build a house and stay there. And that's it.

Also there’s a constant heartbeat sound playing and it's almost as annoying as the way it won't let me use the arrow keys to scroll the camera around. I guess they really want me to use those on screen buttons.

I clicked where the grid lines met at the top of the hill next to my blue village and it raised the intersection giving me an even bigger hill! It also kind of destroyed the village, which I feel bad about, but they’re scurrying around building more replacement huts so I guess it’s fine. I wonder if I can lower the land as well…

Aha, right mouse button lowers land, now I can actually make some progress. I'm going to use all my Transport Tycoon training to make this landscape ideal for my little hut dwellers to thrive on. Which I guess means I'm going to be flattening it all, judging by what the AI player is doing with their corner of the world down in the south east.

Just as I was getting started on flattening my new hill there was an earthquake that beat me to it! I've lost the hill and half of my land as well. Though this actually seems to be working out in my favour as the little guys have upgraded their primitive huts to nice stone houses. I guess it's the number of flat tiles surrounding the building that determines what kind of building it is.

Maybe if I get this land entirely flat they'll be able build a house so big that the front door's tall enough for someone of their height to get inside. Then once that's done I can move on to working out what I need to do to evolve their clothing to the point where they wear pants.

I’ve got some castles of my own now! Though looking at the map the red team is way better at flattening out land than I am, and it’s paying off in way their red meter to the right of the shield is filling up.

Plus if I’m reading the gold icon contraption beneath the meters correctly, then I’m about due for another earthquake. Or maybe that means I have enough power to inflict an earthquake on them? I could try it out, but I don't really want to make all those red people suffer just because of my rivalry with their deity.

Oh bloody hell! There goes all my brand new castles, replaced by a mountain. Red team player needs to make up their damn mind about whether they want a hill here or not, because this is getting old now.

Right, that's it, I'm going to send an earthquake their way. Hope those red folks can swim, because I'm giving them a free moat right where their castles used to be.

Hah! Their capital city was a nice metropolis while it lasted but now it's log cabin next to a pond. Man I'm a terrible god.

At least I’ve learned that I was right and the gold icons across the top right do show the level of disaster I can inflict, as the arrow shifted to the left when I used the earthquake and now it's pointed at an ankh instead. Whatever that means.

I guess I'll get back to flattening out my mountain then. One point at a time.

Actually I've decided that flattening my new mountain is a lost cause so I’m claiming some of the sea instead. It seems that I can only alter the land if there's one of my buildings on screen so I have to be be careful not to scroll the tiny window too far. I'm getting a whole new appreciation for games that let me view an area bigger than 9x9 tiles.

Hang on, the shield at the top right has changed. Are we brawling now? Well this ain’t going to work out well for me, seeing how much better Red is doing. Not much I can do about it though, aside from hit their castles with another earthquake. I suppose I could wait until the arrow on the disaster bar has made it all the way up to the mountain disaster and really hit them hard, but I don't have the patience for that. I wanna punish them right now!

Man I don't know who that bloke in the armour with the shield is, but he's making a mess of my cities. He keeps killing my dudes and setting fire to everything and no one seems to be able to stop him.

Where's the button to give me a knight! Is the the helmet? The ankh? The other helmet? The other ankh? This is why I often prefer words to icons. Except for floppy disk save icons, those are beautiful and perfect and can stay.

Well I managed to give one of my dudes a shield, but it didn't turn him into a knight... then the enemy knight came over and stabbed him. The red team have ruined my land but I'm all out of disaster power so I can't retaliate anymore, and... hang on I just noticed that the icon on the left of the disaster meter is two arrows. Does that mean raise and lower terrain? Am I using up disaster energy whenever I'm altering the landscape?

Anyway I've got absolutely zero hope of pulling this back and everything new I learn just makes me even more confused, so I guess I can't make anything worse if I start clicking all of the buttons.

Ah, the 'scales' button brought up this "Options for Good" menu. So I guess I'm Good then? That's always nice to know. Shame I can only adjust my own options so I can't stop red team from using earthquakes and sending knights after me.

Plus I don't like the sound of that 'Armageddon' power. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. I mean I wish that my worst enemy didn't have it.

The 'earth' button below it brought up this game setup menu, which seems like the kind of thing that should've come up when I first started the game.

I figured that 'Amiga vs Amiga' must mean two player multiplayer via a link cable, but it's probably just setting the AI to fight itself. Though the game actually can do multiplayer, and I doubt it'll be split screen with two mice plugged in like Lemmings, so I suppose it must use a serial cable (or a phone cable). It's also giving me the option to save mid game which I didn't expect. Honestly though I think the 'surrender this game' button's probably more use to me right now.

Some people say that they're crap at games, but can any of them claim to have gotten a game over in a tutorial before? In my defence that tutorial was more like an onslaught of earthquakes and knights with absolutely nothing there to teach me how to play. Trust Peter Molyneux to promise one thing then deliver another.

Right, that's enough of that I reckon.

DOS PC (VGA)

Instead I'm switching to this MS-DOS version that I grabbed a while back when EA were giving out free games on Origin. There's another legendary developer from the 80s and 90s that got eaten by EA. Though it worked out in the end, as if they hadn't bought and disbanded Origin Systems then they would've had to have called their game client Bullfrog instead. Or Westwood. Or Pandemic. Or NuFX...

Anyway, this one's got two frogs on its title screen and reveals that the opposing godlike forces in the game are actually Papa Smurf and Sinestro.

I'll try the Conquest mode instead this time as I don't think I could take another lesson like that last one.

I'm liking this mode a lot more already. I get all the powers, Red gets nothing, plus he's poor and slow. Seems like a much better level to practice on.

Hey the arrow keys work now! That makes scrolling around a lot easier. Though it's still playing the annoying heartbeat and I can't get rid of it without disabling all the sound effects.

Visually the DOS version looks identical to the Amiga game, except you can't see the cross-section of the land around the edges anymore. I was hoping this port might use the mighty PC's extra power to make the tiny slice of land I can view a little bigger, but no.

I've figured out that I can raise land much quicker by clicking twice in the same spot to make a little pyramid, then right clicking to flatten it, so that's going to give me a bit of an edge in this land flattening race. Even if it's probably using up my disaster powers quicker. I like that little white crosshair by the way, as it jumps to the exact point that's going to get raised or lowered so there's no ambiguity.

Sorry Red, I just turned your land into swamp! I was kind of expecting that disaster to be a little more devastating seeing how long it took to charge up, but I guess clearing those swamp tiles are going to be more work for him than re-flattening the land would be. 

Maybe this will help me finally get a bit of a lead, as despite all my advantages my blue bar is pretty much level with his red bar still. Whatever that means.

I feel like there must be more I can do to get my people out expanding my territory faster. Like maybe if I blew up my own castles I'd encourage them to get out and go exploring. I think I'll hold off doing that for now though.

What the hell? A slime monster just came out of the water, smashing every building in its path and leaving a trail of swamp tiles behind it! The screen at the start gave me the impression Red can't use any disasters on me, so I suppose the slime was just in the neighbourhood and decided to pay me a visit.

Thankfully raising and lowering the ground seems to fix the tiles, so he didn't permanently ruin my neatly mown lawn. As soon as I get all these tiles restored the log cabins and tiny forts will instantly turn back into castles and that will presumably be a good thing.

I was so busy flattening land that I didn't notice all the landmasses had gotten connected up, and now my blue dudes are interacting with the red dudes! And by 'interacting' I mean 'fighting'.

I've no idea what I can do to make my team tougher in combat, so I'm just leaving them to it. But now that I've got buildings next to their territory I can modify their land, wrecking their houses and evicting them.

What I'm doing is working, my blue bar is maxed out now, but it's taking forever to get rid of every enemy house manually. There's got to be a faster way to win than this, possibly involving the dozen cryptic buttons I haven't found a use for yet.

TIME PASSES

Man, that took a while; 25 minutes of flattening land and digging up enemy houses. I wonder if it's possible to win a game with enemy towns and castles still left on the map, because that'd definitely speed things up a bit.

Meanwhile, in an asteroid field, this creepy Vulcan is being haunted by ghost heads. I guess he must be my boss, seeing as he's telling me to go battle at Timuslug.

Honestly I'd rather just let the other guy have this one while I keep the first land, as 'Genesis' is a much better name than 'Timuslug'. Though worse than 'Mega Drive'... hey, that gives me an idea!

But first I'm going to check the damn manual already, because I'm sure I'm doing this wrong. Unless all those other buttons are just there to fill up space and decorate the interface.

Right, here is what all of the little icons do.

I didn't write anything about the arrow buttons because I've already said they move the camera around, and the question mark sticks a little shield on someone which lets me see their status on the big shield on the top right.

The ankh-shaped Papal Magnet seems to be a rally point that I can place to draw people to a certain location. First person there becomes the leader of Team Blue. Then I can turn the leader into a knight, who's a walking disaster, wrecking people and cities like a tiny Godzilla in chain mail, and the next person to reach the Papal Magnet replaces them as a leader. Simple!

Okay then, I'll try sending knights out next time and see if that's the one simple trick I need to stop each battle dragging on for half an hour.

SEGA GENESIS/MEGA DRIVE

Here's level 4 of the Mega Drive version of the game, as that's where it put me when I beat Genesis (the number of levels you skip depends on your score). This port looks practically identical as well, except they've moved the icons a little and got rid of the ones on the right. No options! No saving! I'm even moving a cursor around with the d-pad, so the gameplay is identical too.

My people started off in multiple places on this world, so I've been jumping between them with the mini-map, flattening each area for a bit before moving on. It seems to be working out because my blue bar is much bigger than the evil red... orange bar, though the enemy villagers are giving me a bit of trouble.

They started encroaching on my terrain, so I put an ankh down next to them and clicked the button to send people over there. I figured I'd turn my leader into a knight and then send them on a rampage of destruction, but one of their regular looking villagers kicked his ass! He's kicking all of my villager's asses, everyone I send to face him, and I'm not really all that hyped about leading all my followers into a meat grinder actually. It would be nice if there was a way to tell how tough a character is at a glance, because they are not all equal.

There! Infinite blue dudes couldn't take Red Team's one-man army so I dropped the ground under him and drowned him instead. I flattened the land again and my villages moved in to claim the territory as my own.

Then I accidentally clicked the earthquake button and wrecked everything I just built.

Well, that was a pointless waste of manna. That's what the power that lets me use disasters is called by the way. I guess this came out before the spelling had settled down to 'mana' in games for the rest of time.

Here's another interesting fact for you: apparently villagers can die of exhaustion and lack of supplies, though I've never noticed it happen. Mostly what happens is they walk for a bit, then build a house. I guess that's more of an issue on the desert levels.

A rock monster just turned up and he's leaving a rock wall behind him as he tramples all my stuff! That's even worse than a slime trail! Why can't these visiting monsters ever go bother the red people? I bet they'd really love a free wall.

I can get rid of rocks by lowering the ground and dunking them in the water, but I'm thinking that I just won't bother this time because that is not an insignificant amount of rock he left behind. You can see how much land it's covering on the mini-map, I'd be there for ages.

Actually I already feel like I've been playing this level forever and I've gotten tired of it to be honest. I'm fairly sure that the coloured bars show that I've got the population advantage and the manna arrow has reached the ultimate disaster so I'm going to click the ARMAGEDDON button and trigger the end of days!

Oh, well that's a little less dramatic than it could've been. Turns out that Armageddon moves both of our Papal Magnets to the centre of the world and stops us from interfering as everyone comes together for a huge brawl.

It's basically the "I'm obviously going to win this so lets cut to the chase" button, and it definitely finishes things faster than destroying every single enemy house on the map.

Oh, I won the fight by the way, and it moved me a few levels ahead to the desert zone! The different landscape apparently affects gameplay in certain ways and I can't wait to turn the game off and not find any of them out.

I did have a glance at what the other ports of the game look like though and each of them seemed to be just a little more identical than the last. Well, not all of them, as I spotted some slight differences in the SNES port.

Super Nintendo

It's got a printer paper zone covered in Famicom disk cards! Look at the tiny NES and Game Boy buildings! Weirdly the SNES isn't the most powerful piece of hardware on this stage as it goes up to PCs and super computers. Probably because this is an edit of an extra landscape called Bit Plains that originally came with the Promised Lands expansion pack where it featured computers like the ZX Spectrum and Amiga (or maybe the Atari ST, they both look the same when they're tiny).

The SNES version was a fairly early release for the system, as it somehow ended up being one of the first five Super Famicom games released in Japan. It plays a lot like the other versions, except moving the cursor to the edge of the screen scrolls the map and you have to press 'select' to jump to the buttons. It's the Game Boy version I'm really curious about, because how the hell does that work?

Game Boy

Well it's still recognisably the same game, just with an even tinier window. A 9x9 tile grid was bad enough, but 6x6 gives you a pretty microscopic slice of land to work on. The buttons are still there, you just bring them up when you need them, same with the mini-map. Though it took me a while to work out that you have to hold the button and tap on the d-pad to raise and lower land in this one.

Next, the Atari ST version... actually I'm just going assume it's like the Amiga game with worse scrolling and wrap this up here.


CONCLUSION

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Populous is basically Terrain Editor: The Video Game, as despite half the screen being taken up by buttons most of what you're doing in it is raising and lowering land to expand your territory and adjust the size of the buildings. I'm not sure I could call it straightforward, as I'm still trying to get my head around it, but that's the core of the gameplay.

It's not intuitive either, though it does have a decent tutorial that runs through how to play it. I'm not talking about the button on the title screen, that won't teach you shit, I mean the guide in the manual that I eventually gave in and read. Though I did figure one thing out for myself: this isn't as fun as Syndicate, Theme Park or Dungeon Keeper. In fact not as fun as a lot of games, though I'm only speaking for myself here. Populous is a beloved, critically acclaimed classic that defined a genre and put Bullfrog on the map, but the couple of hours I put into it did not bring me joy.

Though I was able to get through a few documentaries on YouTube while playing, giving "The Story of Duke Nukem Forever" most of my attention as I mindlessly flattened out land and dug out enemy houses bordering my territory. In fact muting the sound actually improved the experience for me because it got rid of the constant heartbeat. The game could give you something to do as you work through a podcast backlog as well, as there's 500 levels to play, and if you somehow finish all of them you can get hundreds more and extra landscapes in the expansion packs! Or you could play something like Transport Tycoon (OpenTTD edition) or Rollercoaster Tycoon and put some trains and theme park rides on your hand-sculpted isometric landscapes instead. That's what I felt like doing after 10 minutes anyway.

I've heard that Populous comes to life in multiplayer and the developers spent ages playing against it each other, fine tuning it so that Peter Molyneux could always win, but I can live without trying it out myself. I feel like if I played against an actual person I'd just lose quicker, but not quick enough to save me from having to apologise for taking up so much of their time. I guess I'm not really a 'god game' kind of person.

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Thanks for reading! If you want to share your own opinions, maybe list all the reasons why I'm wrong and Populous is amazing, you can do so in the comment box provided below. You could also take a guess at what the next game is if you want. The person who gets it right gets to feel smug.