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The Making of Shiny's Sacrifice
At the increasingly enjoyable PC blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Keiron Gillen has up a post on the making of Shiny's Sacrifice . A reprint of an article he wrote for the PC Format site, and with extra materials, it goes into the origins of the title with game designer Eric Flannum. From the article: "'One of the biggest things which stood in the way of Sacrifice appealing more was that there were so many different and new things in it we were asking a lot from the player as far as what they had to learn and accept ... From the visual style, from the lack of a disembodied camera ... RTS players especially had a lot of new concepts to wrap themselves around' Of course, these 'problems' were also some of the things which absolutely distinguished the game. 'It was definitely one of the strengths of Sacrifice - its wacky visual look,' Eric considers the issue, 'but at the same time ... well, there's something about 'an archer' which communicates on a very basic level what that unit does. People don't have to learn. But when you've got a little pyromaniac, there's an extra step of learning. They don't inherently know what he does.'" At the start of his post, Gillen mentions the retrospective piece on the game he wrote for his personal site back at the end of last year, which is also well worth reading. I have to admit, I'll take almost any excuse to talk about this game; it's a sorely underappreciated title.
When I first played through I picked Jim (ala Earthworm Jim) as the god for all my missions (I'm glad I did, it turns out he's probably the easiest). This last time I picked Stratos and spent a couple days fighting through, it was much harder this time, but Stratos' creatures always did suck. It's the one game I always wanted to play multiplayer and never got the chance to.
If you can get a legit copy of the game, it works fine in XP SP2. I actually pulled an ISO off the CD with CD Clone and mounted it with Daemon Tools, so no problems there (that way I can always keep it around).
Another great game I managed to get finally working was Dungeon Keeper (pretty much the only reason I never hunted Peter Molyneux down to kick him in the nuts after forgetting about BW and buying Fable for full price on release day). I still can't get DK2 working, but DK was a cinch, ripped and mounted in the same fashion.
The only bad things about Sacrifice were 1) the last mission was disproportionately hard (stupidly so in fact) and 2) no one bought it so it was hard as hell finding anyone willing to play it, or who even knew how (3 tutorials to learn game basics).
It really is one of the best games made since 2000. The visuals and gameplay were amazing. The controls seemed a bit hard, until you fired up a copy of Black and White (then you wanted to kiss the UI guy's feet). The spells, wow, I wish those damn WOW devs had played the game back when I was playing, maybe then magic in the game would be fun and impressive looking!
BTW, Bovine Intervention wasn't Jim's only fun spell, the one that created the huge pit in the island was a blast as well.