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Populous: Text Based Tutorials Need to Die In A Fire

Posted by John Constantine

Like every other Peter Molyneux game outside of Fable and its sequel, Populous escaped my attention the first time around. I remember sitting in my buddy Mike McBride’s house in the early ‘90s watching his brother play the game for hours and thinking, “I have absolutely no freaking idea what is going on! Why is nothing jumping or shooting?” XSEED, being the swell cats they are, sent us a copy of the new DS version of Molyneux’s classic, so I’m finally spending some time with the man’s much loved debut.

I have absolutely no freaking idea what is going on.

This is because Populous DS is frontloaded with that most dreaded of barriers between player and actual play: the text-based tutorial. Over the course of thirty minutes, you are given a text passage explaining the game’s basic rules and then asked to perform them individually, pretty much guaranteeing that you will retain none of the information you were just force-fed incrementally. Would it be so hard to have text pop-ups explaining the mechanics while you actually play the game instead of separating them? Is that really too much to ask in this magical day and age of narrative-integrated, in-play, and skippable tutorials?

You make it hard to love you, Populous DS. Dag nab it.

Editor’s Note: Text adventures are allowed to have text tutorials. I guess.

Related links:

Molyneux's Redemption?
Impressions: Fable 2
Screen Test: Fable 2
This Week in Shrieking Annoyances

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Posted Nov 25 2008, 07:00 PM

Filed under: john constantine, nintendo ds, fable 2, peter molyneux, fable, xseed, populous

Comments

al said:

Hehe, That one brings back memories. I bought populous second hand when it first came out and no instruction book came with it! and no tutorial either! It took me freakin ages to figure it out!

November 26, 2008 2:41 PM

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John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself.

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