Kimmo’s Blog (classic)

Populous was produced by Bullfrog and published by Electronic Arts in 1989. Personally it was the time influential years for myself, but I think Populous can teach us something beyond nostalgia.

I believe it was Populous that brought the term god-sim into game-lingo. If I recall correctly it was originally intended that the two sides in the game would be God and Devil but this was changed into simply ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Players intention is to keep a good care of his people, which simply consists of leveling out the land and keeping it level and free of boulders. I think this idea is lovely on its own, but there’s one idea in the game that I think deserves more consideration.

It is the way you control your people. Your people have one designated leader that you can order to go from one place to another, but otherwise you control your people as a whole! This is the idea that e.g. Populous: The Beginning (P3 so-to -speak) lost and succumbed to the boring, unwieldy style of painting a group of people and telling them to go somewhere.

In the original Populous it didn’t matter how many people you had, the control method stayed the same and as effective. The player influenced his people with three buttons that either set them to settle new places, stay home and grow stronger or attack the enemy. Compare this with many so-called realtime-strategy games way of laborously giving orders to your troops one, or a group at a time.

I find this kind of indirect control very interesting and one which would work in any type of game.

NetHack is a game that would have enough to write about for a few good books, but since we are blogging here I’ll try and make it short and simple.

NetHack is a Rogue-like (who even knows this day what Rogue was like?) computer roleplaying game. That’s the classic definition. More to the point it’s one presented in colored ASCII-characters, turn-based and immensely detailed. NetHack is a good example of a complex game that doesn’t swamp the player with it. In any given game the player won’t come in contact with most of the games intrigues. This means theres plenty of stuff to wonder over for years. There’s a joke about the DevTeam thinking about everything.

But that’s not where I’d like to draw the attention in NetHack. The main lessons NetHack can give any particular game enthusiast would be:

1. Computer Games can be revised, honed, perfected indefinetely. NetHack has been in development some 20 years.
2. NetHack isn’t imprisoned by it’s rugged apperiance but draws power from it and makes it work for it.  There are features in the game that would be practically impossible to realize without it’s ASCII-base.

Ok, is that concise enough for you? Need something elaborated? There is a thing called comment-section in this blog these days…

As a follow-up to my previous post, I here take a good look at one of my favourite games of all times and why it matters.

Pinball Dreams was released back in 1992 and was one of the last big hits for the Amiga. It came quite out of the blue, made by first-comers Digital Illusions (DI), also known in the demo scene as The Silents. Pinball Dreams is a pinball game with 4 different tables with different themes.

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Ooh, I love catchy titles. My goal is a bit loftier than just pimping my own interests though!

There have been number of computer games in my life that have offered me certain insights into what this medium can do. These are quite often also my favourite games. My intention here is to mention a few of those games (a top five if you like) and then proceed in the coming entries to tell what they can teach to us about computer gametry. If you’re a game designer , you should pay attention! The games I have chosen are (in no particular order) [Name, Publisher, Platform]:

• Pinball Dreams (21.st Century Entertainment, Amiga)
• NetHack (The Devteam, all major computer platforms)
• Populous (Electronic Arts, Amiga, with others)
• Super Mario World 1/2 (Nintendo, SNES)
• Half-Life (Sierra Studios, Electronic Arts, Valve, PC, with others)

This is for future reference.

Game idea is the Problem, designing game/realizing that idea is the process of solving that problem, solution is whatever gameprogram that is the product of that problem solving.