Once upon a time there lived an Aunt who was really cool.  A Cool Aunt, one might say.  The Cool Aunt lived in ideal circumstances, and was quite fond of video games.  So much, in fact, that she would often indiscriminately purchase games based exclusively on the cover of the box.  Needless to say, Cool Aunt ended up with a lot of duds, but being that she was a true fan of video games, she would often play them regardless of their dubious quality.  Still, some were beyond reproach, and ended up being chucked into a paper box underneath her entertainment center along with leafed through gaming magazines, strategy guides, and other bits and bobs (at one point there was a boxed Timex Sinclair 2068).  And there those goodies sat, waiting for some youth, desperate for entertainment, to play them.



The day Cool Aunt game me that paper box was awesome enough, but taking it home and going through it was even better.  To a kid used to paying for rental games with cash gleamed from returnable bottles, suddenly coming into possession of a bunch of games was an amazing moment!  Since I had already spent a year saving up to get an SNES, naturally those games attracted me the most, and there were a total of three SNES games in the box.  Populous the first game I pulled from that box and the one I ended up playing the longest in the end (another one of those three games was Inindo, a Koei role playing game, which I played to completion).

Populous was published for the SNES in September of 1991.  While not a launch title per se, it came out early enough as to be frequently mistaken for a launch game.  Originally developed for the Commodore Amiga by Bullfrog in 1989, it is often seen as the progenitor of the god game genre, and was ported to many other platforms, where it helped solidify Populous in the minds of gamers.  The SNES version was one of last authorized ports of the game, but was the first to not to have actually been developed by Bullfrog; instead, it was developed by Infinity, a Japanese company known for RPG games. The result is a game which is very faithful to the original Bullfrog title, but also has a bit of other unique elements that help it stand apart from earlier computer and console ports; it is the best Populous port to play for the best possible experience.


The game play of Populous is very straightforward, yet contains enough of a strategy element to make it engaging.  Like Civilization and SimCity, this game has the power to engage you, and before you know it, a lot of time has passed.  The secret is in its simplicity..  The game is centered on you, a benevolent god of good, tending to a group of people.  You start off with a few people (and a leader, recognizable by the massive ankh he carries), but with a bit of manipulation you can cause them to multiply.  Your main power is to raise and lower the land, creating high peaks or sinking the ground into the sea.  But what you really want to do is to create flat land, so that your people can create buildings and thus, increase in population and strength.  The larger the area of ground you create, the larger the building that they build (from a mud hut to a massive castle). The size of your buildings affects their strength (more on that later).  From here, you can select several different options to influence your people's behavior, including causing them to spread throughout the land to attacking their enemies around them. 

While you are aiding your people, your nemesis is across the map, doing the same thing as you.  When you realize this, the real-time nature of the game turns the game into a bit of a race as you do your best to spread your people far and wide in as strong as a structure that space permits.  Quite soon, your people and their enemy will meet, clashing for control of structures, fighting out in the open, and adding more tension to an already intense game.  It's then that you realize you can raise and lower the land near your enemy (depending on the proximity of your people to those lands).  This adds a little bit more to the game, but sooner or later you will discover the rest of those buttons on the bottom of the screen and how they relate to the matching ones at the top right of the screen on the slider.  And then, the real fun of the game begins.

The slider in question is called the mana bar, and is slowly filled up based on the strength of your people's structures. As more mana builds, you can activate calamities such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and floods, which cause quite a bit of damage, but when used without caution, they can really put a damper on your chance of victory.  Still, with a bit of strategy one can play these powers to aid in your victory.  For example, build all of your structures on high, flat land and a flood could reduce your enemy to a tiny population to all but ensure an easy victory. 


Although it isn't consistently the most effective on a large scale, my personal favorite mechanic is the Knight.  Activating this power will turn your leader into the Knight, a veritable machine of death and destruction.  He will immediately head towards enemy land, killing enemies and burning down their structures, leaving a trail of scorched earth in his path.  Inevitably, he will be killed, but the price is usually quite high, since structures on the land the Knight destroys have to be lowered down to the maximum level and raised again before it can be built upon.  This can easily distract the enemy enough for you to either gain a foothold or recover if you are being overwhelmed.  The only down side to the Knight?  You have to get one of your people to touch the dropped ankh once the Knight is created, which can be really easy to forget about in the heat of confrontation. And trust me, you don't want to be caught without a leader.

Given the amount of strategy that occurs in a match, there is an "easy out" victory that you can use, provided that your population is larger than your enemy's (which is shown on the upper left of the screen).  Pressing the "Armageddon" button (skull and bones icon) will cause all of your structures to disappear and all people to move to the center of the map for a final battle.  Larger numbers will always win, but since the houses and castles all disappear you also lose any bonus points once the level is over.  Still, since matches can drag on if you make poor decisions, using this option can be a blessing in disguise.  If you don't have a good enough start and there is too much water between your enemy, his population can be too large to take down quickly, even with the help of a calamity.

So now you are at the end of the level and have vanquished your enemy.  You collect points and move onto the the next level out of 500.  Yep, you read that right.  Can you imagine playing through all 500 levels of this game?  Me neither, and for all the time I spent on this game, I didn't even get close.  There is a bit of variety between levels, as there are 10 different types of terrain, each with its own set challenges.  Some levels allow for very quick development, while others are very rocky and can be difficult to build strong shelters.  Six of the ten levels are themed and change the design of shelters and people, which adds variety....at least until you've seen them all that is.  The first time you play a round on Piglet Land won't be enough.

When I was finally done with Populous it wasn't due to getting sick of it.  Far from it, this game was a slow burn that lasted for months.  Instead, it was due to receiving Final Fantasy II for Christmas, which basically pushed every other title away (including another Cool Aunt game, Hillsfar, which I had been playing on the side) for a long time.  I still played a ton of games at my friend's house, but everything at home was ursurped by FFII.  To this day, I really have no idea what exactly happened to my original copy.


So there it is, my review of Populous for the SNES.  It's a great game that I feel doesn't get enough attention by players, who for the most part have played it on the PC or haven't even played the original. In my opinion, the third entry is a much better game, and maybe even some of you clucked by my "failure" to give the DS port this accolade.  While the DS version allows for more intuitive controls and nicer graphics, it falls into the annoying trap of modern remakes: trying to put story and context where none is needed.  So if you haven't already, check out this game.  If you are a fan of the "God" game genre or just simple real-time strategy games in general, you'll probably have fun with this.

Lastly, I'd like to thank our very own slackur, who generously gifted this game to me.  Thank you my friend.  It had been near twenty years since I've played this game, but when I fired it up, it really brought me back to that time.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

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