Populous (Amiga)

Developer:

Bullfrog

|

Release Date:

1989

|

Systems:

It's been on a few

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the legendary god game genre pioneer Populous, by equally legendary developers Bullfrog!

It's one of Bullfrog's earliest games, only the third one they made, which you can tell from that old school frog logo in the bottom left. I don't remember ever seeing that before, but I've played this game so I must have. Unless it was Powermonger that I played... they're pretty similar looking and it's been a while.

One thing I'm sure about is that whatever it is I played, I couldn't figure out how to play it and I turned it off after 10 minutes of frustration. I guess I was too busy not seeing the cute little frog logo that I didn't notice that big 'Tutorial' button over on the right either. This time though things are going to be very different! I'm going to stick with it for at least 20 minutes before giving up in frustration.

Populous started out as an Amiga game and I've always assumed it didn't stray much further, as it seems like the kind of game that would be considered too mouse driven and weird to make it onto consoles. But nope, Populous was ported to absolutely bloody everything. Well, the Acorn Archimedes, Apple Mac, Atari ST, FM Towns, PC-98, MS-DOS PC, IBM PCjr, Sharp X68000, Master System, Mega Drive, SNES, Turbografx-16, Nintendo DS and Game Boy anyway. Makes me wonder what the NES did to be left out.

Just listing all those systems took long enough so please don't expect screenshots of each of them. Or screenshots showing off any actual gameplay either. I can promise you only a title screen and shots of all my little dudes getting wiped out for reasons I can't even comprehend.

Read on »