This is the sixth post in our Game of the Day series.
I never owned a Sega Genesis and it didn't bother me much until I played this game! I don't remember who lent it to me, maybe a friend of a friend / my brother; or Kevin Norwood with whom I traded off civilization building over the course of an entire night. This was my introduction into god games and town construction that led me to a Warcraft 2 addiction later on. And on a console no less!
These days companies are still trying to figure out how to put an RTS ont a console without requiring a keyboard/mouse combo. Somehow Populous did this and it probably wasn't elegant, but the ever-expanding little hovels and people more than made up for the lack of a decent interface. It wasn't like anything I had ever played before and even since it's fairly unique.
Your people were influenced by you, being the god, but you didn't directly control their every action. You didn't tell them to build a home there, they just did after you flattened the land for them and put your totem near it. Your presence rallied them to battle and construction, love and loss, etc. It was a completely engrossing experience, being responsible for an entire people, and watching them grow and take over your nemesis' denizens.
My favorite aspects were the initial burst of building from one or two tiny peeps and then later the pitched battles between yours and the evil (or "other" god). You could see his totem being placed near prospective war locations and he would drown your people by affecting the land as you would too. Then when your crusaders (and hopefully not simple town folk by that point) met, there would be tiny one-on-one animations of them fighting. One would win, one would lose, and you'd hope to completely decimate the computer-controlled forces.
Not only was it some rough form of building and battle strategy game, but it also operated in slightly 3D. That is to say, with land being raised or lowered, you had to see it. And so you got to see the hills and valleys of the land in a primitive, isometric view. At the lowest point was water and any peoples left on a spot you lowered to that level would drown ... in a horrible little animation of them waving their arms franticly before falling under forever.
Later on I bought a version for the PC, but it failed to match my nostalgia's expectations as much as memories of that endless night gripping a sweaty, cheap-plastic controller, cursing an opposing and inhuman deity.
Read more about Populous at Wikipedia.
