Alien Nations (2003)

Black & White series

Part God Game, part player psychology test, part character study, part Tamagotchi. Lionhead Studio's first game pushed the who God Game thing to the next level, while you were again a Deity lording it over an archipelago of islands, the game's most notable feature was the giant creature you had to look after and train up. Depending on how you treated it and it behaved, it would morph between an angelic, colourful creature or degenerate into a red eyed, smoldering, spiked monstrosity. It polarised players at the time: you either loved it or hated it.

Darwinia (2005)

You play the part of a hacker who logs into an online space called Darwinia, a sort of cross between a virtual theme park and an R&D project for artificial intelligence. The denizens of this world, the Darwinians, are little more than static icons that live within this primitive environment. Unfortunately, Darwinia has been thoroughly ravaged by a nasty red Virus, and you are recruited by Dr Sepulveda, director of the Darwinia project, to save their world. It all looks and feels like some academic's dry research project, but as you progress through all the levels, Darwinia seems to take on a strange life and depth of its own. Its the strong sense of metaphysics in the storyline that caught me by surprise: the primitive Darwinians are taking their first tentative steps into self awareness. Strange to see that juxtaposed with gameplay straight out of Centipede!

Actually, Dr Sepulveda reminds me of British entrepreneur Clive Sinclair, who developed the Sinclair ZX80 8-bit home computer (amongst many other things). Things like ZX80's, Commodore 64's and other 8 bit home computers led to home computer gaming, the explosion of the "bedroom programmers" in Britain in the early 80's, some of which kick-started the process that led up to modern PC gaming. In them tharr distant days, games were small, developed by a few guys and knocked out every few months. The (very few) people I knew who played home computer games back then had their favourite game programmers along with their favourite rock stars. Very little of it exists these days - which is why Darwinia has caused quite a stir online amongst the digerati and any game commentators old enough to remember when home computer gaming (as distinct from the arcades or dedicated consoles) was only a few years old. You just had to be there, I guess.

Darwinia is essentially a single player campaign, although it surprised me by having considerable replay value. There's a little bit of strategy here, and a little bit of simple management there. Darwinia is part gaming nostalgia and part period-piece cyber punk drama, all with an added dash of metaphysics. As you progress through the missions, you learn more about the Darwinians' life cycle and get more involved in their struggle. Dr Sepulveda helps you by developing and improving the subroutines that drive everything. For a game, its hard to categorise.

This is a genuinely independent little production, quite original and worthy of a bit of support. Its very basic, cheap and very fun. The atmosphere and world is unique, especially in a contemporary gaming world riddled with cliché and dominated by self-absorbed franchises. Darwinia, by contrast, does its own unique thing without the need for years of development, millions of dollars and a team of hundreds. Being the old fart I am, I'm hooked! :)

Evil Genius (2004)

Heaven & Hell (2003)

Populous series

Bullfrog single-handedly created the God game with this series. Long before the acronym "RTS" was coined, there were "simulation games", of which Populous was the sole example. After lots of shoot-'em-up sideways scrollers (also long before what we call the First Person Shooter) flight sims and turn based adventuring, suddenly there was , Populous finally offered a computer game that seemed unique to computers. It didn't refer to movies, or showground shooting galleries, or pretend dashboards - it referred to something unique to itself; a simulated world with its own rules, populated by imaginary creatures who had lives and who lived within the closed ecosystem of the simulation. If anything, it resembled a virtual ant farm, but with wild and woolly rules and crazy game mechancis just for you.

You play the part of a minor deity lording it over their people, and whose power is determined by the amount of Mana their devotion generates for you. You could raise and lower land, create gardens out of swamps, raise mountains - and best of all mightly smite those little sprites with your own terrible plagues, floods, fireballs and thunderous lightning bolts. Populous was the first multiplayer game I played (1v1 via a serial to serial connection on two Amiga 2000's) in real time where the two of us fought it out like two viruses in a petri dish. Its what I imagined computer games should have been like, instead of paltry reproductions of other things, like shooting galleries in old agricultural shows or dorky RPG's with the mathematical sophistication of dice rolling and double digit arithmetic. I found the first computer games very, very uninspiring, although their potential had me hooked for ages.

Populous: Promised Lands (1989) was an add-on of sorts, and simply modded the simple, pixel graphic tileset of the game into wild and wacky variations. (Basically, it was a custom mod!) There was LEGO world, Bit world (as in 16bit, lands made of computer components), Wild West world, French Revolution world and an abstract world made of geometric shapes.

Populous II: The Trials of the Olympian Gods (1992) expanded the original concept into a Greco-Roman setting. This was a vast graphical upgrade with expanded scope, more features, animation and effects. Being able to sprout volcanoes with lava, vast tidal waves, rains of fire, tornados and the archetypical finger bolt of lightning on enemy Heroes made it all worthwhile. Lots and lots of fun, if I recall: an excellent sequel.

Populous III: The Beginning (1998) took the full 3D route and gave a you a complete spherical world to crash around on. It was interesting, but not as substantial looking as its isometric pixel art predecessors, who enjoyed lush looking graphics by comparison. That is, they seemed pretty lush for the standards way back then. Early 3D games in the late 90's looked very grey and primitive compared to their more developed 2D sidekicks, and they're nothing compared to what's thundering around now in the games industry. Developers were still counting every polygon back in the day, and art direction and game mechanics were long on big ideas, nut a bit shorter on actual appeal and hands on gameplay. Populous III used crude polygonal detail and simple, sprites for characters. Its still worth a look, as it does have Bullfrog's innovation (and weird interface design!) and sense of the surreal.

Long before Supreme Commander gave us its "strategy view", one of Populous III's innovations was a cosmic zoom of its own, traveling from ground level to a low orbital minimap view. Unlike Supreme Commander, Populous III could also let you roll the camera around the small world you were fighting for, which was the only way you could see everything.

Spore is now finally realizing what this particular game series could only vaguely hint at.

Powermonger (1991)

People tend to wax lyrical about developers Westwood (now defunct) and Blizzard establishing the "standard" RTS model, but that's not to say there weren't other strategy games that played out in real time a long time before them. Bullfrog created Populous in 1989 well ahead of Dune2 or Command & Conquer - when games of this nature were simply classified as "simulations". Simulating a real time conflict when the idea of a computer calculating and playing out a big battle was still pretty exotic. It was also a tricky thing for a basic 8bit or 16bit home computer to do as well. Populous created a new type of simulation called the God Game, which played out in the same vein as the original SimCity, except with the player literally playing God and only indirectly affecting units.

Powermonger was a step up in complexity from Populous, and more of a proper war game, using generals, troops and economic and technological management. It was utterly generic: not fantasy, not religious, and not historical, not at all specific to any time or place, much like really vintage games such as the Ancient Art of War. It was simply a "war" game in the same way that It used a 3D real time engine (you could even zoom in and out) where you annexed a string of three dimensional maps using Generals and a force of guys recruited and trained from nearby towns and villages. I played this a lot on the Amiga 2000, and it was pretty cutting edge for its time. 3D games back then to dazzle players with dozens, even hundreds of polygons at a time, use lots of sprites for characters, and have frame rates of under 12 fps (pretty slick for back then) - and more often a lot less.

Settlers III (1998)

SPORE (2008)

Spore is what you might call a Massive Singleplayer Online Game, where you play you the game on your own, but all the creatures you encounter have all be created by other players playing the game on their own and uploaded to a massive server online. Spore is really a sequence of editors strung together in a simulated environment. Everything will be editable, from the creatures right through to their civilisations, buildings and vehicles. If nothing else, the gaming industry is slavering over the prospect of a title where the users provide 99.9% of all the worlds and creatures within it. For the players, the sky's the limit - and no one really knows where Spore may wind up. It'll certainly be interesting to see where this goes.

In mid 2008, the Spore Creature Editor Demo was released, and after a briefly flurry of penis monsters and trying to make monsters from games like StarCraft, the number of Spore creatures generated by the demo began to rival the number of species on the planet. i.e. millions. The Creature Editor shrewdly incorporated both screengrabbing and YouTube uploads, so players can easily swap creatures amongst themselves and parade them in public without the need to recruit other players first. The screengrabs have embedded metadata so that each image can be used to copy creatures from one game to another.

More to come soon.