September 30, 1991 — Populous

There are some very demoralizing entries early on in the history of the SNES.

It makes me wonder if every next-gen system has these kind of growing pains. In it’s fourth week in North America, Nintendo released two titles, for a total of 12 games so far, and a lot of them are either ports from older systems or sports games, and I would have sworn games like Starfox and Zelda: A Link to The Past were launch titles that gave the system buoyancy, but really it was a dozen floaters.

Populous is one of the best-selling PC games of all time, and I can vividly picture the box and the cartridge because it was a staple of every video store that was predictably always in stock.

Brought to the SNES by Acclaim Entertainment, a studio that would make a lot of games and few of them were great.

A fun fact about Acclaim, via Wikipedia, is that the chose the name so they’d be listed above Activision, who picked their name to get listed about Atari.

Why no one chose to call their studio Aardvark or AAArdvark is a mystery.

Anyway, Populous is skippable, despite it’s best-seller status. The PC version has to be superior because maneuvering the cursor with the controller is tedious and slow.

Here’s where I feel there’s a lack in my reviews, I’m giving each game a chance, but I’m not necessarily going to read the instruction booklet to understand the game. That’s a result of my modern gaming mind: I should be able to learn the game without having to study anything prior.

I flipped through Populous’ instruction booklet and there was a lot to take in and there’s a little too much reading for me to bother jumping into Populous in any serious way.

You can skip Populous.