Black & White's gorgeous graphics are certainly its highlight, with incredible attention to detail and a real feeling of manipulating a living, functioning, world.

So we’ve had a look at Populous II from the “mind” of Peter Molyneux and which I decided is a god-game which actually, in some ways, subverts its deep strategic intentions to be an entertaining and quite fast-moving clickabout which is fun even though it’s largely about flattening land. So what of the other game?

Well, Black & White came out in 2001 and is also from the “mind” of Peter Molyneux. It’s quite obvious when you start playing the game and have a flick through the fairly-hefty manual that B&W (as I’m going to insist on calling it from now on because it’s quicker) is the spiritual successor to Populous and its sequels even if it isn’t officially part of the same series. This is, once again, a god-game and, yet again, the player is up against rival gods using both followers and godly-powers to claim victory in a succession of landscapes.

There are, however, striking differences in gameplay. The main one of these is the addition of the creature, a hugh animal which becomes, in a way, your representative on the earth and wanders around under simple artificial intelligence “experimenting” with eating stuff and chucking followers around or whatever. The player, who is represented in-game by a floating hand, can slap or stroke the creature to “re-inforce” good or bad behaviour; what this means is entirely up to the player. This means the creature can, theoretically, be trained into doing tasks for the player like running about gathering-up food from farms for the granary or, if you’re a meanie, kicking the poor followers about and keeping them in line.

Indeed, the possibility of being a “good” or “bad” god was the driving force and selling-point with B&W, “find out who you really are” as the game’s tagline has it. Godly powers include everything from being able to grab fish from the sea and chuck them into the village food-store, to throwing followers around, to hurling fireballs and lightening. All of these things understandably make an impression on the mere mortals wandering around on the ground and increase belief in the player’s god. At a temple, worshippers dance around creating mana which is needed for the godly powers. The player can determine how many of his or her followers are worshiping at any time and is responsible for making sure they’re well fed and rested. The followers themselves build villages with buildings although the player-god can micro manage by creating scaffolds and dictating what should be constructed. Each village has a radius of influence which the player-god can act within meaning that, say, if a player village grows enough that its influence reaches an enemy village the player can start hurling fireballs or people around in it; this increases belief in the player god in the village: get enough and the village is yours.

Unlike Populous II, B&W has the very modern feature of some kind of narrative  - largely explained by a “good” and “bad” character who accompany the player throughout the game and who are actually quite good fun – involving evil gods being horrible and kidnapping the creature and the like. This is the first thing that I feel goes against the game: I like the way Populous II is just a series of challenges getting slowly but surely more difficult whereas B&W has relatively few stages that take a long, long time to complete. The second thing that goes against the game for me is how this is achieved: impressing rival villages is actually rather dull and building up your own, interesting at first, becomes tedious and more like work than fun. I actually spent about an hour playing this where I was doing nothing more than picking up rocks and fences and stuff and throwing them at an enemy village to build-up belief.

None of this actually means that B&W is a bad game. There’s plenty to do and, unlike Populous II, there really is wide strategic depth in there but unlike the older game, after early enthusiasm it starts to feel more like a way to spend a few hours rather than something that’s actively a lot of fun. Reviewers at the time felt the same way: early excitement and praise for the visuals (which are, by the way, superb even 10 years later) and high scores gave way to disappointment as the much-vaunted creatures (which is, incidentally, one of the game’s most interesting features) were revealed to be difficult to keep tabs on and were actually captured or crippled in some way for several of the game’s levels, and the interaction with the villagers which seemed to promise so much variety was revealed to be mostly picking them up and throwing them or assigning them various tasks. Molyneux has, with B&W, created a very nice, very interesting idea for a game that isn’t quite as fun or as intriguing as it sounds on paper.

If you liked the Populous series then B&W (which you can doubtless pick-up for peanuts these days) is worth a look, although I found it became more work than play after a while, even if it does look stunning. There’s a sequel, Black & White 2, which came out a few years later and which I haven’t played but which may well fix some of the gameplay problems in the original. Maybe I’ll find out and let you know some day.

If you take too long to conquer a world monsters from ancient mythology start wandering across the sea and land causing all sorts of indescriminate trouble, a nice touch.

Happy New Year for the Space Year 2012, I hope you had a good Christmas and all of that. Now, where were we…?

This is the first part of a story about two games I’ve been playing quite a bit over the holiday period. They both have the same designer (Peter Molyneux) and share a lot of the same DNA but are separated by ten years and represent very different evolutionary stages of gaming. One is Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods and the other is Black & White.

Populous II I bought from Good old Games for the distinctly un-princely sum of $2.99 (that’s less than two quid in real money) during their Holiday Discount period (it’s over now, you’ll have to pay a mammoth $5.99 for it instead!). I have a lot of good memories of playing the Amiga version in the ’90s and the PC version is largely the same only with higher-resolution graphics, a few new features on full-screen mode, one extra spell and (as was typical in the early ’90s alas) poorer sound. For those who aren’t aware of Populous II it’s a god-game (in fact I think the first Populous may have been the originator of that particular label) where the player takes on the role of one of Zeus’s many demi-god children and must fight numerous opponents taken from Greek mythology (starting with figures like Pan and other demi-gods and ending with the gods of Olympus themselves) over an incredible 1000 different levels. Each level is an individual world containing followers of both the player and whoever you’re up against as well as having a number of rules (eg in some worlds water is fatal and others not, in some worlds you can raise and lower land and in others not).

A wee man representing the army of your leader leaves his villa. Maybe he's been forced-out by Coalition housing benefit cuts (satire! Or if you will, since this is ancient Greece, satyr)

To complete a level you have to defeat your opponent demi-god or deity which means you have to wipe-out his population of followers either by slowly defeating them or massively outnumbering them, building up enough mana to use a godly power called “armageddon” and have everyone change into a mythical hero and charge towards a big ruck from which only one side’s followers will emerge victorious. There are other powers to help you win as well and these are slowly handed-out to the player as he or she progresses through the game. These include the “papal magnets” which provide a focus for your followers, various godly powers (including destructive powers like rains of fire and earthquake as well as subversive ones such as the fonts which change the allignment of any army which walks through them) and the heroes, based on characters from Greek mythology, who the player’s leader (identified by the tiny papal magnet which floats next to him/her) takes the form of and who then march into the enemy’s land to do mischief based on who they are (Perseus fights people, Helen of Troy leads them away etc). Your followers will build houses and cities based on the amount of farmland they have access to so you spend a lot of time manipulating the geography until its nice and flat so that your people can multiply.

Populous II takes ages to get going, so to speak, having so many levels and a gentle learning and difficulty curve. What makes it work, though, is that it’s plain fun and the range of things you can do means there are numerous potential strategies to win. For example, on earlier stages its easiest to just create farmland, have your followers settle it and build-up mana for armageddon, the computer being too slow and dozy to build up his own followers quickly enough. Later, though, the computer gets faster and more aggressive and starts sending his followers into your territory and using godly powers to trash your land meaning you have to respond in kind and can use godly powers, heroes or even just standard armies to invade and take-over his land and defeat him more quickly (speed brings higher scores, quicker advancement through the levels, and sometimes more experience). The Populous titles have often been criticised for being “land-flattening games” because, early on especially, this is what you spend most of the time doing but the fact that you end up mixing this up with a little warfaring, self-defence and godly wrath as the game slowly opens up its wide range of features means this is a simplistic criticism. Flattening the land is also, believe it or not, quite satisfying and nimble mouse-clicking makes for faster victory (indeed, Populous II is arguably as much an action game as strategy).

Whenever I return to this game I’m surprised by how well the gameplay has aged, how much fun it still is to play and how it manages to suck you in for hours despite the more rational part of your brain claiming that there’s not quite enough variety, largely because despite all the godly powers and no matter how much you might enjoy it you are still just spending an awful lot of time flattening land. Like Black & White, which I will talk about in the next few days, Populous II is a product of a starry-eyed ideas man but in this case his grand plans have somehow created an addictive, absorbing action-cum-strategy title which offers the player a great deal of potential strategies but ultimately has less depth than I think he imagined although is arguably better for it. Can the same be said for Black & White? Does it marry the enjoyable gameplay to real depth? Ooh, let’s see in a few days shall we…

Footnote: a data disk was released for this game called The Challenge Games which took place in Japanese, rather than Greek, mythology and had both a conquest game and a series of levels based around puzzles. As far as I know, this wasn’t released for MS-DOS computers and isn’t available on GOG, a shame.

"Rip my skirt off as I fall into the level, would you? Take THAT sexist 1980s programmers!"

Along with most of the population of Scotland I was sent home from work early today due to the storm which decided to pay us a visit (and which has been dubbed ‘Hurricane Bawbag‘) and as a result I ended up having to fill an afternoon with the wind battering at the windows. So I played some games, including the old, mildly-sexist arcade game Athena.

And here’s a thing – I’ve known about this game for years (in fact I first encountered it as a demo of the Spectrum version on a “sampler” tape given away free with CRASH magazine in late 1987 – that’s how old I am) and played it a good few times, but I never knew that the “lovely” Athena could grow to GIANT SIZE, a la Mario. Now I do.

Athena‘s quite good in a frustrating-as-fuck way; you should probably try and find a copy.

"You Sons of Bitches", indeed.

The verbose ewgf on World of Spectrum drew my attention to this YouTube video (which itself was a response to this earlier clip) which is an excellent summation of what’s gone wrong with mainstream commercial gaming. The emphasis on storyline, character and plotting (all of which have traditionally, with the exception of text adventures and RPGs, been made secondary in videogaming) means that the actual “game” experience is turned into less a challenge and test of skill and more of an interactive, and frequently interrrupted, way of passing through a narrative. I was amused to find that I wasn’t the only one thinking “I wish they’d get on with it” when watching the parody narrative in the “modern Doom”.

The irony is that its two games which, in their own right, are very good that are to blame for this malaise: Half Life, which popularised the linear environment and “cinematic” feel in FPS games; and Halo which introduced the “hide and recharge” mechanic (which made sense in Halo’s universe but makes none in modern shooters). Whilst, at the time, these games felt innovative and refreshing the way they’ve come to define The Only Way Games Should Be Done means that their faults become glaring.

I don’t play a lot of modern games and when I do I’m always frustrated that the superb visuals and in-game physics are used to create such story-driven, set-piece riddled “experiences” rather than good old fashioned explorable levels and shoot-em-up gameplay. Are there many modern, commercial, mass-market games which buck the trend? Do let me know.

Mister Bandit goes wandering around a mystical cod-medieval landscape. Later he'll probably visit Ancient Rome, or starship.

Chances are you haven’t heard of Time Bandit. You’ve probably heard of Time Bandits, of course, because it’s the brilliant 1981 fantasy flick directed by “the American Python” Terry Gilliam, everyone’s heard of that except boring bastards. But Time Bandit is completely unrelated, sharing nothing but a similar name. And it’s a shame that you’ve probably not heard of it, because Time Bandit is in its own way just as brilliant.

If I’m being honest the reason that I’ve heard of it is because of the aforementioned link: I came across a game called Time Bandit on the Amiga, wondered if it had anything to do with the film, loaded it up and realised that it didn’t. But after a couple of hours worth of play I realised that that’s not important because Time Bandit is a brilliant mixture of videogame styles with an ingenious non-linear progression.

Originally appearing on the relatively obscure TRS-80 home computer in 1983, Time Bandit was later ported to the Amiga and Atari ST in ’88 and it is these versions which were most popular (and which I am concentrating on). The easiest way to describe Time Bandit is to say that it’s a Gauntlet-style top-down game which borrows elements from other games including Pac-Man and Bomberman as well as text adventures (yes, really!). The player travels through time visiting different worlds (and a signpost which gives information about progress so far and the option to save the game) via a main Mario/JRPG-style scrolling play area; these various worlds, all of which can be accessed from the start, are split into 16 stages and in each stage the basic goal is to open the exit and escape at which point the player is returned to the level selection area and has the choice of either re-entering the world just visited and attempting the next level which will be more difficult or of tackling a different world and returning to the next level of previous worlds later on. Whilst playing a level of a world, which uses the same top-down scrolling display as the main selection stage, the player can simply concentrate on reaching the exit, take time out to grab as much treasure as possible dotted around the world (score for treasure in a level increases for each treasure taken so the first will be 100 “cubits”, the second 200 etc) or even take a quest or solve puzzles that can be found in the level. The worlds themselves are very diverse covering various time zones (hence the game’s name) and include an Enterprise-style starship, medieval castles and even a Pac-Man-style maze. They’re also full of ‘orrible things which spawn from (apparently indestructable) points on the floor and patrol the rooms and corridors. Our hero can dispatch them with his laser/plasma/whateveritis gun earning cubits as he does so; and depending on skill and bravery in doing so, earnings for beastie-shooting increase, reducing again if the player shows a lapse in heroism.

If the above description confuses the hell out of you (and I don’t blame you) try watching this YooToob vid of someone playing the Atari ST version and you might get the idea.

Like many great videogames, it’s better to discover Time Bandit and its wealth of features and surprises (barely scratched in the above description) for yourself. It’s not perfect – a time limit on levels would have stopped score-scumming and the text-adventure aspect, whilst a nice touch, would have worked better as some kind of icon-based arcade-adventure instead. Nonetheless, this game is great fun, addictive, and pleasingly barmy and despite the mixture of game styles sounding utterly bloody absurd on paper it somehow works. They really don’t make them like this anymore, although to be honest they didn’t really make them like this back then either.

Oh, and there’s a two player simultaneous option as well…

Post-Tizwas, pre-looking jowly on HWTBAM

I’ve Daren at the World of Spectrum forums to thank for bringing this wee YouToob gem to my attention. It opens with some promotional videos for a whole raft of videogames for various home computers circa 1984. Apart from the obvious retrogaming interest side these puff pieces are worth a gander because they look so cheaply put-together, like those adverts that used to appear in cinemas for a local curry house. The joystick ad is hilariously amateurish (you can almost hear the director saying “can you just wiggle it a bit more…”) and many of the voiceovers (the wonderful Tom Baker excepted) sound dreary and pedantic; it doesn’t help that some of the games look like they’d appeal most to the side-parting and NHS-specs crowd.

Five minutes in we move to a documentary called “The World’s Greatest Computer Games” presented by Chris Tarrant, back when he was still considered a yoof-friendly presenter. This is a bit of a promo piece as well but Tarrant proves a much more engaging voiceover and actually manages to make the games sound fun rather than snooze-inducing as the previous promos managed to. And with phrases like “splattered all over the screen”, “before I’d mastered the joystick”, “I’ve got to fly my chopper as far as I can” and “precious booty” (which Chris laments not even getting a “sniff” of) do I detect a hint of under-the-radar innuendo? Or have I just watched too many Carry On films?

On a more serious note, this is a fascinating look into how the media dealt with videogames when they were still a new phenomenon. There’s an interesting point around 11 minutes in where Tarrant talks about the difficulty in fitting videogames into popular culture claiming that they owe something to films, books, board games and carnival games. It’s also easy to see the earliest incarnations of genres which are now slick multi-million pound efforts from RPGs through platform gaming and sports simulators to games based around music. Flight sims seem to have completely vanished from the radar, though, so to speak. There’s also an abundance of the early, eccentric, gaming that was a result of the individuality in the industry at the time and which was stamped-out by the growth of corporate games publishers only to re-emerge in the last decade with the rise of the independent sector.

Well worth a watch if you’re interested in old video games, 1980s media, or even just a young(ish) Chris Tarrant in a rugby shirt.

I don't like having to fanny-around with GIMP making these "montage" pics. I hope you all know that.

Well, this is odd. Not that long ago I wrote a post about two games I had recently discovered and grown to love: one of these was the superb iThing game Forget-Me-Not and the other was the 27 year old ZX Spectrum platform/action game Frank N Stein. Apart from having eerily (are you sure this is the appropriate word to use? – Imaginary Ed) similarly-structured names these are both excellent pick-up-and-play titles. And, weirdly, I’m going to tell you about them both again or rather about updates to both of them. That’s right, both.

First we have the excellent, if not entirely surprising, news (which reached me via Stu Campbell) that Forget-Me-Not has been ported to Windows and Mac-OS based machines for free. It’s probably my favourite game of the year so far and if you even slightly like videogames you have absolutely no excuse to not download a copy and learn to love it as much as I do.

The second, rather more interesting, news is that Frank N Stein creator Colin Stewart has been busy slaving over a hot Spectrum (or, more likely, emulator but let’s not destroy the romantic image) and has produced a brand new version of his 1984 game. That’s right, 27 years after it was originally published to cries of “It has lots of little additions (like ice patches) that make it better” and “Overall, a good game” from CRASH magazine we have a brand new update of this classic platfomer with new features and extra levels. Stewart isn’t publishing the game until the 14th of September – exactly 27 years since its original release, but he sent a review copy to the Retro Brothers who have an exclusive review of the new version here.

The first room. Should have been called "Willy's Gone to the Dogs" or something.

A quick article this time around and one I was inspired to write when I discovered, today no less, that there’s another little-known entry to the Jet Set Willy series along with Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy II.

It’s called The Perils of Willy and was released only on the Vic 20 in 1984. It’s not a homage game, it’s  an actual official Miner Willy game published by Software Projects and it even has the distinctive art style used by the later games on its box art (check out its entry here to see). I was intrigued to say the least.

So, I found a copy and gave it a shot.

One of the first things people will wonder is “why didn’t it come out on the Spectrum, then?”. The answer is obvious as soon as you start playing: Perils is, basically, a poor man’s Manic Miner. It’s a screen-by-screen platform game where Willy has to collect all the objects on the screen (musical notes in this case) in a time limit to complete it. Due to the Vic’s 16K of memory it’s far more limited than the 1983 Spectrum game in terms of variety (although it supposedly has more screens – 33 in all) and the srooms lack names (something I always think removes a lot of atmosphere). The sound is technically better thanks to the Vic’s superior sound chip but the repetitive in-game tune is nowhere near as, well, likeable and atmospheric as Manic Miner‘s croaky rendition of In The Hall of the Mountain King and quickly becomes annoying.

Having said that, The Perils of Willy is actually not bad at all. It’s nowhere near as good as Manic Miner but once you get used to the games little quirks (such as Willy’s jump which feels ridiculously long and the Vic’s display which is lower resolution that the Spectrum and makes Willy look like he’s been at the pies) it’s an entertaining wee game in its own right and the screens are well laid out and satisfying to beat. In fact, it’s a bit of a shame that a converted version of this couldn’t have been knocked-up to provide a bonus B-Side to Jet Set Willy II. Worth a shot for Willy-heads (fnar).

Collect the flowers and build the monster. They're very similar, thematically.

Once again I’m going to fill a gap in postings here with a couple of recommendations, one new and one very old. First up, I was visiting family in That England recently and my brother’s fiancee asked for app recommendations for her iPad. Now, whilst I can remember the details of a text adventure a mate was going on about twenty-odd years ago (long story) I couldn’t recall any of the dozens of iProduct apps I’d seen recommended recently bar the ZX Spectrum emulators, and I doubt she’d have been interested in that. “Oh, hand on” says I, something emerging from the fog of recent memory, “there’s one called “Forget Me Not”, or something like that.” So she goes looking for it on the app store and there it is for a very reasonable price. It gets downloaded and we all have dinner and, afterwards, I decide to pick up the pad and have a wee shot.

I was picking up that iPad a bit too much over the next couple of days. And gurning. And going “bugger!” a lot.

Forget Me Not provoked that reaction not because it’s bad but because it’s terrific, in fact frequent cussing is a sign I like a game; if I don’t I tend to just sigh and switch it off. Loosely based on the old Commodore 64 title Crossroads and incorporating aspects of both Pac-Man and Rogue it’s one of the most addictive little games I’ve ever played and, like all truly great videogames, reveals more and more features and subtleties the longer you play it. There are rumours that it will be available soon for PC and Mac as well as the iThings. Can’t wait!

The other gaming recommendation is much older but was brought to my attention due to something far more recent. Frank N Stein is an elderly platform/action game for the ZX Spectrum clearly drawing inspiration from a certain 19th century novel and which, until very recently, had a few bugs which made it impossible to pass certain levels. There’s been a recently push amongst the 8-bit community to fix these geriatric gaming bugs and Frank N Stein, nearly 30 years after its original release, now has a patched-up version available. About time too as it’s a brilliant, varied action game that forces to player to plan and think at the same time as dodge monsters.

I’ve provided links to both games in the text above (you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to find them) so click away. As a way to end this article I’ll mention that I recently helped-out in the bug-fix stakes by playtesting the newly-fixed version of N.E.I.L. Android which I can now confirm is completable but which I can also state is utter crap.

Here we see the robot fully-built in all its "glory". More Robbie the Robot than Transformers but still...

Fun with old games

To be honest, the way I rabbit on sometimes you’d think that ought to be the name of the blog (I do like lots of stuff published after 2000, trust me on that!). I’m afraid I’ve unearthed another oldie, an arcade machine this time, which I decided to try based on the unpromising premise that the Spectrum conversion got a bit of a rubbish review in CRASH magazine: Mag Max.

First things first: remember the way the ground scrolls in perspective in Street Fighter II and how that looked pretty awesome back then? Well, this game does that too with the entire play area and it came out in 1985. That’s not bad going is it? Something for the programmers to stick on the CV: did the SFII scrolling before first.

But you can’t judge a game on its fancy graphical flourishes so how does Mag Max play? At heart it’s a reasonably-tough side-scrolling shooter with a wee space ship that scoots along the ground, so far so half of the games from 1985. Where’s the unique selling point? Well, the Mag Max one is delightfully daft: the wee ship you control is not all it seems, it’s actually just one part of a big robot.

You see, whilst travelling through the level other bits of robot appear: things like a head and arms, a big chest-gun and, of course, a pair of legs. The head and legs don’t appear to have to be collected in any order and as well as providing extra fire power and making the player look a bit more impressive (or ridiculous if you’re slightly cynical in which case piss off and play CoD or something) they provide armour of sorts; if you get hit then you lose the various extra parts of the robot piece-by-piece until just the ship is left at which point another hit loses the player a life.

But that’s not all – dotted around the level are metal-ringed holes in the ground which open and close, fly the ship over them whilst open and the player is transported to a subterranean side-scroller this time with the ship/robot in the air rather than skimming over a fancy-perspective surface meaning play feels more in line with the likes of Nemesis. Whilst the overground bad guys tend to be bullet-disgorging gun emplacements here aliens in attack waves are more the norm along with red stalegtites which the player can crash into if not shot away (and, in an excellent touch, net 1000 points if they hit an enemy on their way down). Naturally, there are holes in the ceiling at intervals which can be flown-into to return to the above-ground view.

The subterranean scrolling level on the underrated Spectrum version.

Mag Max is fun, addictive and very very ’80s. The overground/underground (but no wombling free) aspect to each level as well as the “collect parts of the robot” feature provides variety and helps make what could be just another mid-80′s highscore game something a bit more special. And, to my surprise, the Spectrum conversion actually isn’t that bad at all and is an amiable and playable (if predictably colourless) attempt at recreating the arcade game on 1982-vintage British budget hardware. The game was also ported to the Commodore 64 and NES although I’ve not played those versions and so can’t comment. Given that both machines were pretty good when it came to scrolling shooters, though, I doubt they’re shite.

So, yes, overall Mag Max is a whole bundle of silly highscore fun with a massive robot in it. Just one thing: the ingame music in the arcade version is complete arse. The sort of jolly, plinky-plonky stuff that’s more at home accompanying big-eyed cartoon children bouncing through fields and collecting magic raspberrys or something. What woz they thinkin’?

(I was moved to discover more about Mag Max after reading this interview with Mark Jones at the Retro Bros. blog; only seems fair to mention and linky)