Populous - Sega Master System (Playthrough & Opinion)
17Populous was one of the first games to coin the phrase ‘God Game’ and was one of the early titles of Peter Molyneux who would later go on to make the likes of Dungeon Keeper, the Fable series, Black & White and recently Godus. Populous was released for a whole bunch of formats at the time, however it was ported to the Master System via TekMagik.
The game is a single player strategy game sees you play as a literal God as you compete against a rival god and his ‘evil’ followers. Your task is to simply achieve dominance over the land by making your people prosperous and by damning your rivals. To do this you have to flatten out land so that that can create larger structures and eventually produce children to increase your influence. The more influence that you have gives you more and more god powers. In order to hamper your rival you can bring forth swamps onto fertile land, produce large mountains on their flat land, flood the world, cause earthquakes and create a killer knight who will attack and destroy enemy structures. Eventually when you gain so much power you can force everybody to abandon their homes and start pummelling each other to decide who is the superior race – which is a horrible thing when you think about it, you are actually committing genocide, but that’s how you win at the game.
Populous is rather simplistic looking with some fairly detailed sprites and some colourful visuals. It’s not the best visuals that the console can handle and I’m not a massive fan of the isometric view and it means that you cannot see as much of the world – however the mini map does help in that regard. However one thing that I will say is that despite the number of followers roaming about the screen, it doesn’t seem to slow down or resort to flickering.
In terms of controls, one button preforms the action with the other allowing you to switch between the map and various god options surrounding the map. It can be a little bit awkward to play using the joypad – it’s not ideal, you would rather have a mouse, but there’s not a lot you can do about that here. Given the control scheme, the developers have done a good job, it’s easy enough to understand how to play it, but ultimately can be very difficult in the later levels.
The Master System version of Populous is a fabulous game on the console. With thousands of levels to play supposedly it is a very good port and well worth playing, despite the fact that Populous may be seen as a little simplistic compared to other strategy games today. Essentially you are just doing the same thing over and over again – flatten the world, throw down a couple of disasters, before starting the all-out brawl, rinse and repeat.
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