"Populous 3 The Beginning on Windows XP and Vista" by Troy H. Cheek on Oct 12, 2009
No offense intended towards Codemasters and their Overlord II, but I haven't played it in weeks. I mean it. In all seriousness, I noticed the shortcut on my desktop the other day and actually wondered what it was for a few seconds. Yes, I'd forgotten all about it.
What's taken up my time instead? Well, in addition to work, family, and emailing my girlfriend, I've been playing quite of bit of Dungeon Keeper II and Populous 3. I've already spoken at length about my problems getting Dungeon Keeper II working with modern operating systems (well, as modern as I get, in any case) so I suppose it's time to talk about my problems getting Populous 3 working with the same.
In short, there weren't any. See you next week!
Still here? I guess I need to type some more, then.
You see, the main problem I might have had was that Populous 3 was written with 4:3 screen resolutions in mind. I don't have any 4:3 displays anymore. However, I'd already figured out how to get my 4:3 games to display the way I wanted on my 16:9 and 16:10 monitors, so I was happy. Sure, 640x480 and 800x600 are pretty lousy resolutions by today's standards, but after the scaling and filtering and whatever else the video systems were doing, they look pretty good. Beside, nostalgia doesn't have to be perfect.
Unline Dungeon Keeper II, my original Populous 3 installation disk worked just fine. Sure, I went ahead and tracked down the latest patch, updates, addons, expansion packs, and everything else I could find online, but that doesn't change the fact that the original game ran just fine. I didn't even have to set compatibility mode or anything like that. About the only thing I had to do was set it for Software Rendering instead of Hardware Rendering. Populous 3 was designed with first generation 3D accelerator cards in mind. Anybody remember 3dfx? I've had to use software mode ever since I changed video cards that first time, so I kind of expected that. Populous actually ran in hardware mode, but the graphics were a bit glitchy. I'd rather have my textures not quite as smooth and my edges not quite as sharp than have clipping issues and odd bits of buildings sticking out at odd angles.
While I might like to play at some resolution higher than 800x600, the resolution changer I found only works with the hardware version, which everybody but me seems to prefer. Of course, it seems like everybody but me likes to play Populous 3 online against other humans. Ditto for Dungeon Keeper II. In fact, I've intentionally not installed some patches because the file description reads something like "Redirects IP to new server, uses the new match finder, allows single player games to be played in multi mode (this makes single mode unplayable, but no biggie since only complete losers play single anymore)."
I have a philosophical objection to using computers with thousands of times the processing power it took to fake landing a man on the moon to play the 21st Century equivalent of chess by mail. Plus, I just hate people. Yes, my idea of heaven consists of a barren world, devoid of life, populated by myself and an army of robots whose behavior I control.
Okay, so I'm not quite that antisocial. Still, I'm one of those people who takes their personal interactions in small doses and who "recharges" by getting away from everybody. The end of pretty much every day is me retreating to my cave and playing games against robotic opponents. Or, as we like to put it, "Hi! I'm home! If you need me, I'll be downstairs blowing stuff up/killing things/voiding warrantees." All on the computer, mind you, against robotic opponents with no feelings to hurt.
Anyway, so far I've played Populous 3 all the way through, I've dabbled with Undiscovered Worlds, and I've gotten my butt handed to me by Age of Chaos. Undiscovered Worlds is the official expansion. I've played it before and beaten it. Age of Chaos is a fan-produced campaign. It's tough. The creator is quoted as saying something like "Oh, yeah, it turned out too difficult, but we never got around to making it winnable." Naturally, I took that as a challenge. In the first mission, I thought I figured out the "correct" way to win instead of just building up a huge army and wearing the enemy down by attrition. I then discovered that the "correct" way actually wasn't all that correct. I guess I'll try the huge army tactic next time.
One thing I don't like is this "enhanced displacements" that every patch or addon seems to want to add. The original Populous 3 had tiny variations in textures. Apparently, I'm the only one who likes tiny variations in textures. Everybody else likes to enhance the displacements which really increases the variations. The land and water are much rougher, the variations much more extreme, and for some reason I just don't like it.
Of course, all this might change now that I've discovered Google Sites. Actually, I discovered it quite some time ago, but it kept going unresponsive while I was trying to create my site, so I forgot all about it. More recently, I've noticed that it's starting to look fairly smooth and polished. In fact, it seems to have a lot of the tools and applications that I've been cobbling together from disparatre sources or even coding from scratch. It's really tempting to start trying to re-create my site in Google Sites. One thing is stopping me. More accurately, 940 things in 34 folders are stopping me. Converting 11MB would take practically forever. Only an idiot would even consider doing something like that.
So, if this website isn't updated for a very long time, you know what I'm doing.
