As I said, I was able to enjoy the game once the issue was fixed, so I did!

Over the course of a couple of days and a total of maybe two hours, I managed to complete the first five levels. I am now absolutely sure that my skills in gaming have in fact improved compared to my skills as a kid. Playing old NES and Sega games of my youth as an adult sometimes made me think my reflexes worsened or something. Now, I’m pretty sure I just had more willpower and time to push through my failures. It was all about playing it over and over again until you memorize the pattern.

Populous: The Beginning, Combined Forces Level

It’s never actually explained how you travel between planets.

Populous is a strategy game, though, so it wasn’t all about the reflexes. Still, in my youth, I played it on the PlayStation, meaning I had to use the dual shock controller instead of a mouse. Suffice to say, it was really hard to micromanage anything.

Boy, my mind really started wondering for a moment there. What I actually meant to say was that the first six levels felt extremely easy and not at all as hard as I remembered them. The fifth level, Death From Above, I remembered as especially difficult. Basically, you had a time limit and only a limited number of people and spells. The goal was to get to the back of a huge enemy village and pray at the statue there to summon a bunch of dragons. I was stuck at this part for weeks and eventually only managed to get through it by “cheating”. I used a boat to get to the back of the village, somehow tricked the game into letting me land at the bottom of a cliff and then used a land bridge spell to create a path to the top.

Populous: The Beginning, Death From Above

Sadly, you don’t learn the spell here, not yet.

This time, I did it the proper way and I succeeded on my first try. I’m not sure if the mouse made it that much easier, or if my skills in strategy games improved over the years, but overall, the game seems much easier than the game I remember.

It’s still fun, though, so I’ll continue to play it every now and then.

Nostalgia!

I used to own this game on the PlayStation and I absolutely loved it. I never finished it, mind you, because it was way to much for my skills then, but I loved every moment of it. One of my favorite things was to play the first level and just build my village, bigger and bigger, until it filled the map. Of course, I had to use cheats to unlock the landbridge spell and increase land size, but I didn’t mind cheating to have fun. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The other day, the game was half of on GOG.com, so I bought it on an impulse, not realizing it has issues on Windows 7 and 8. Hardware mode crashes on startup, and, even though the game can run in software mode, it stutters to the point of unplayability for me. I spent some time trying to fix it and eventually sort of figured it out.

Populous: The Beginning, Planet Selector

I had a crisis of my own for a moment there, but I managed to get the game to run adequately.

I got some sort of custom version from Populous: Reincarnated. This pack is 96MB compared to over 300MB for the GOG.com version. I’m nut sure if it’s legal, but I payed for the game twice now, so my conscience wasn’t giving me any issues. In any case, this custom version had the same issue with hardware mode, but software mode ran smooth. What it lacked, though, were the cut scenes. Luckily, simply copying the FMV folder from the GOG packed to this one made those work two, so now I had a completely playable version. Just in case someone will need this information in the future, here it is, one more time:

How to make Populous: The Beginning run smoothly in software mode:

  1. Buy and download the game from GOG.com. Install in some place.
  2. Download the 96MB package from Populous: Reincarnated. Install in some other place.
  3. Copy the FMV folder from the GOG install location to the Populous: Reincarnated install location.
  4. Run popTB.exe from the Populous: Reincarnated install location to play the game.
  5. Optionally, increase the resolution to the maximum of 800×600 in software mode.
In any case, I could enjoy the game now, so that’s what I did.