For years there has been a common myth that RTS style games have no place on consoles. I believe that many of the people spreading that myth must have missed out on Overlord for the NES. This is a port of the Commodore 64 game of the same name. Other than a step down in the graphics department and a slightly clunkier controller interface the game plays very much the same as its C64 counterpart.


The goal of Overlord is to terraform planets and manage the resources and populations from those planets to make your way across a solar system to challenge and defeat that systems terrible Overlord. The difficulty choices provided at the start of the game determine the size of the solar system you'll be traversing with the easy mode having just 8 planets to traverse with the hardest mode having a whopping 32 planets to explore.

As with most RTS games Overlord relies heavily on resource managment and unlike a lot of early console RTS games doesn't need to pause the game to do so. Everything is as the genre suggests, in real time. This means you've always got to keep your guard up and make sure you know what is going on in each of your planets or you'll quickly be overrun by a fairly aggressive CPU even on the easier difficulties.


When first encountering a planet you wont know what kind of resources can be provided until you finish terraforming it, which can take several weeks depending on how far away each planet is from the last destination of your Atmosphere Processor (Terraforming device). The game always starts you off on the planet furthest from your opponent so you have a little time early on to explore and gather resources without worrying about the military aspect of the game at first. It is very important to take advantage of that time early in the game. Once your device is done making a new planet habitable for your population you'll find out what kind of resources are available. There are 4 possible planet types: Tropical, Desert, Volcanic and Metroplolis. Tropical Planets yeild the highest food production, Volcanic is great for mining fuel for your star ships, Deserts are great for setting up solar satellites and storing energy to keep your growing populations with power, and Metropolis is great for increasing your general population. Each type is important and none can be ignored.

The final stats you have to take into account are tax rates and credits. You can change tax rates as you wish at any point in the game and they can be different for each colonized planet you control. The lower the tax rate the higher your population growth will be, the higher the tax rate the more revenue you'll take off the population but at the cost of population growth if too high. The credits are used to purchase transports, Atmospheric Proccessors, farming equipment, mining tools, and military weapons and vehicles.

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