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Populous the Beginning: fog of war

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I hate fog of war. I particularly hate it when the enemy uses it to land loads of boats in quick succession and then set off a volcano in the middle of my base.

The joke was on them in the end, though. The top of the volcano provided a great platform for several watch towers manned by fire warriors, who then knocked people out of any subsequent boats before they could land. It took a while to build up my tribe again, of course, but once I had enough warriors and preachers I created a causeway and set up a camp on the top of a hill overlooking the yellow’s base, from where I could rain down lightning and swarms. Capturing boats would have just been a bit too slow.

I haven’t mentioned the unseen enemy level here. It turned out to be pretty easy, for once, as the enemy only attacked across one thin land bridge, making it easy to defend. I kept a fair number of warriors and preachers in the centre of my base to deal with the invisibility issues, but there were few occasions they were needed.

Populous the Beginning: building a bridge, again

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A new computer, and starting from the beginning of Populous the Beginning, again. This time I could have imported my previous save, and I still might, but with the increased graphical prowess of the new laptop I thought the game deserved a full showing. This coincided with an update to the game on GOG, which has made it run much more consistently and stable on Windows 11, and I’ve been running it through GOG Galaxy rather than the multiverse launcher which had previously been needed. To be honest, the quality improvements through the multiverse mean I’ll probably revert to that at some point, but for now I’ll up my time played counter on GOG.

PC gaming is still mostly about configuration.

None of the first levels gave me a problem, of course, although I had forgotten the best strategy for Death from Above and spent a minute or so bumbling around the world in a boat. I still passed it first time, though, after gathering multiple warriors and preachers and surrounding my shaman on her trip to the statue.

I finished with quite an epic battle on Building Bridges. The green tribe opened up the passage to my peninsular quite early, so I was having to fight them off at the same time as fending off yellow raids. It was only after I reinforced the three entry points with multiple followers, and set my shaman on top of a hillside to concentrate on lightning spells, that I was able to amass enough force to take the totem and open the bridge between the two tribes, sparking a conflict between them.

The next level to play is one of my least favourite – Unseen Enemy. I’ll tackle that when I’ve got some time and patience.

Flock: a different type of bird watching

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In many ways, Flock reminds me of Flower, the relaxing1 and peaceful game on the PS3 (and other Sony consoles) where you gently guide the wind and petals to find new blooms. Guiding your character – someone riding a giant bird – is really easy, with the vertical component automatically taken care of and only the horizontal direction left for your input. This means you can spend time looking in the distance for where you want to go, and also for signs of creatures.

You have to find the creatures, you see. Your aunt is a zoological expert but she can’t be bothered to move from her water tower perch, so instead you have to go out into the world and search for them. When you find a creature, you can observe it for a little while before having to identify it. Is it a bewl (bean-like creatures with no legs), a gleeb (generally those with wings), or a drupe (a bit of a catch-all category)? Once you’ve identified the family, you get more accurate descriptions to compare against the creature on the screen. Why we need to identify the creatures is unclear, since Aunt Jane tells us if we get them right or wrong. Really she should just get down and do it herself.

That would be a bit more of a boring game, though.

Creature hunting isn’t the only aspect though. Evil robber creatures have stolen flutes and knitting patterns and are buried in mounds of grass. You have to find these mounds, and get the flying sheep that follow you around to graze there. Once they’ve eaten all the grass you can see the tail of the awful evil baddie, and you can pull them out of the hole. This is needed if you want to get the whistles for each family of creatures, and once you have the whistle you can get any creature to join your flock, following you around. You can also increase the number of sheep by finding them around, and increase the number of creatures in your flock, and (most importantly) get new clothes to wear.

It’s really difficult to get a decent picture of how the flock follows you around.

To start with there’s not much of the world uncovered, and you can see creatures relatively easily. After a while the Emperor Cosmet appears, and when it’s been identified the fog or clouds or mist or … whatever it is clears a bit, and new areas are revealed. Some of the creatures require more of a stealthy approach. Some are really fast and you have to be lucky to see them. Some are just rare. As well as the requirement to find the creatures, some of your Aunt’s friends are dotted around the levels on perches, and you have to find them and carry out other tasks.

The game has an amazing and consistent art style, and charm by the bucketful. The day/night cycle is quite affecting, and I suspect that the reason that some of the spaces in my catalogue are still unfilled is because I need to look at certain times of the day. I think I’ve unlocked most of the map now, but there are still entire families which are undiscovered.

  1. Until the horrendous and depressing last level. ↩︎

Pokémon Blue: settling to a team

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I have a feeling I am now at the point where I lost interest in Pokémon Yellow, and I recall feeling a little uncertain when I reached this point in Pokémon LeafGreen. When I last wrote, Pikachu was several levels higher than my other pokémon due to him fighting and defeating every enemy in the caves; I now have a similar problem with Dugtrio whose Dig (and now Earthquake) moves proved invaluable when scaling Pokémon Tower, and fighting the electrical enemies. I have progressed through the underground passages, obtained a silph scope (which allowed me to identify the ghosts in Lavender Town), fought Giovanni – the boss of Team Rocket, routed the inept baddies from Silph Co, woken Snorlax1 with a poké flute and then captured him, and found a mansion containing the programmers of the game.

My team is all around the high 30s, other than Dugtrio who is at 47, and I am having to resist the urge to just use him over and over again. I am fairly settled with a team of Dugtrio, Charizard, Weepingbell, Vaporeon, Haunter and Pikachu – waiting for a couple of them to evolve – but I’m aware that others may come along to replace them at some point.

I am varying the colour scheme I play with to suit my location, the time of day, and the strain on my eyes.

Indeed, I’m not sure where I’m off to now. I have just obtained the SURF and FLY moves, but currently there’s no pokémon in my party who can learn FLY so I’m taking the opportunity to journey by foot and level up my companions some more. There are large areas to the south with oceans which were previously unreachable, so I’m heading home to see my mother and then onwards to the southern islands.

  1. My previous style guide continues. Since I don’t rename my pokémon, one that I have caught and am holding is capitalised as a proper noun. The generic name for that type of pokémon is not capitalised. I caught Snorlax when I woke him up, but then when I woke the second snorlax I was unable to catch it despite the fact I threw multiple balls at him when he was at virtually zero health and also asleep. ↩︎

Club Drive: hardly drivin’

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For Christmas I received the Atari 50 compilation, which collects a large number of Atari’s most celebrated games together and presents them alongside a museum of stories, videos, and artwork spanning the fifty years of the company. It is a fabulous resource, including a lot of arcade and 2600 classics, which I will no doubt talk about in future posts.

As well as games from the early years, there are some titles from the Lynx and the Jaguar. There are some high profile games missing, I presume because of licensing issues or because they weren’t developed by Atari – Aliens v Predator on the Jaguar, and Blue Lightning on the Lynx, are two that stand out. The Jaguar titles therefore seem a little scattergun, but it’s a good opportunity to play some I don’t own the cartridges for.

If you have seen my my to do list over the last decade or so, you’ll have seen I aspired to own Club Drive for the Jaguar. That wish has finally come true, in an approximate way, and I’m glad I didn’t spend more time chasing it. Because Club Drive is pants.

The key problem is that it’s largely uncontrollable. You accelerate with the right trigger, and turn with the d-pad (or left analogue). But to turn more sharply if a corner requires it, you pull back on the d-pad (or stick) as well as holding the direction. No need to slow down, your car suddenly just develops a smaller turning circle.

Get too near to the side of a cliff and the car will often decide to jump off itself. If it does, the game rewinds itself to a point just before you fell, and then the car invariably falls off again. Often this is accompanied with an unexpected change in viewing angle, so you have little hope of recovery, unless you rewind a lot further.

There are three modes: collect ten sphere things dotted around the level; race from one end of the level to the other (and back again); and a tag game for two players only. The collection game is painfully slow and dull. Racing is against the clock only, and I was doing well at this on the Wild West stage until I hit a hidden flashing wall which bizarrely transported me to the front of the Atari office building. It’s just all really janky.

Imagine this moving at 2 frames per second and you’re pretty much there.

I have raced on all four of the levels, plus the super secret course (which isn’t so secret on Atari 50 since there’s a message to press X to select it, I presume because it previously required a combination on the Jaguar keypad) – the latter was absolutely no fun at all since I couldn’t see where to go or control the car on the ramps. I don’t think I’ll persist with it.