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NYT Profiles Creator of Black & White and Fable
Amy's Robot writes "The NYT has a profile of Peter Molyneux, creator of 'Populous,' 'Black & White,' and the upcoming 'Fable.' In Fable, the moral decisions you make affect the character's appearance, the outcome of the game, and so on. You get the impression that Molyneux's unconventional approach to game design infuses each of his creations with something more than your average game. Fable will be released for X-Box on September 14."
Because I was fooled by all the hype for Black and White and actually bought it. Yes, paid cash money. And it sucked. It was boring and buggy.
That game was a disaster. I mean I wanted to like it, I really did, I'm a huge Populus fan and B&W sounded so cool. After about 6 hours of play I just had to accept the fact that the game sucked.
The problem was too much of this pioneering and doing your own thing, I think. Like the creatures, he decided to make them really trainable and to that effect gave them a pretty indepth AI... that sucked. Good idea, shitty execution. Same with gestures. Seems neat until your wrist is aching from having to do that fireball gesture 100 times.
Hopefully he learned something from that because Populus was just dynamite and I'd love to see more from him of that quality.
from the article: "majority of malevolence is caused on a whim"
I can't wait to try this game... finally I can be evil and get away with it >:]
Yes, that's the one. The original game seems to be most readily available used for Super NES and Genesis.
But at the same time the game was seriously flawed -- your creature was *ALWAYS* learning, so you could never misbehave infront of it. You could spend weeks training your creature to be good, then for some reason you might HAVE to kill people in the game, your creature would see, he'd start killing people, and you couldn't stop him from doing it -- because at some point you actually had to play the game instead of baby sit your creature, and at that point your creature would wander off, kill people, and you couldn't discipline him for it.
Still a great game, finally a good use for my xbox :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
What about Dungeon Keeper?, I didn't play any of the Populus games, but Dungeon Keeper sucked away atleast 6 months of my and my friends lives. Hopefully this game will get released for the PC eventually, we need something new that isn't a sequel. And even though most Molyneux games are very similar in gameplay (your god), they always have something new and original that makes it worth playing
The game was originally released for DOS, Atari ST, Amiga, Genesis, SNES and Sega Master System. There's also Populous II (less SMS). A 'modern' PC version called Populous: The Beginning was also released a few years back. Your best bet is googling or by searching the plethora of abandonware sites that are out there. My personal vote goes to the Amiga version.
With regard to the current state of the genre, I maintain that Westwood's 'Dune II' is the mold in which virtually all RTS games since (to some usually large degree) have been cast. Modular base construction, one-screen GUI+top-down view, not to mention the cornerstone of all such games: the lockstep of game pacing to resource gathering.
Although, IMO, the paradigm is a hoary old Cliche Golem here in 2004, when 'Dune II' arrived more than a decade ago as the unheralded sequel to an unsatisfying adventure title, it was remarkably fun and innovative at the same time. Westwood continued releasing incremental sequels (called 'Command&Conquer' so that it was their own IP and they didn't have to pay licensing to Herbert estate); Blizzard copped it quick with 'Warcraft' (eventually creating the best-balanced penultimate RTS, 'Starcraft'), et al.
Literally, though, "real-time strategy" games have been around much longer; the question becomes the denotation of RTS as a genre. 'Populous' for example, though "real-time" is far more accurately categorized as a Builder due to its gameplay mechanics (abstracted vs. direct control, no military, etc.)