I specifically didn’t say Syndicate. I said Syndicate Wars. Syndicate was great.
Magic Carpet wasn’t a fantastic game - it was a neat engine with a decent ‘Oooh’ factor. How many people actually played through all 50 odd levels?
Because I saw you mention Syndicate first, I thought you were still talking about it, not its sequel. (I missed seeing the ‘Wars’ bit :?)
I finished Magic Carpet 2, Unfourtunately I never had more than the demo for the original but that demo is what caused me to buy the sequel. Evidently enough people owned/played it to for them to make a sequel.
I also finished Magic Carpet 2 and loved every minute of it.
Same here.
IIRC, Netherworlds was noticeably more of a game than the original. The first was interminable levels of precisely the same action until your brain atrophied.
I did and thought it was a great and truly original game. The first First Person Strategy I tried.
I like all of PM’s earlier games. I never picked up B&W because of the criticism and never played Fable due to my lack of an Xbox.
I’m looking forward to The Movies and I really liked Alter Ego, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt untill something solid is revealed.
I played all 50 levels of Magic Carpet and liked it much more than the sequel, although both have earned a place on my “best games of all time” list. Utterly fantastic games.
A pirates style (ie- faithful) update to magic carpet would be really really cool.
Frankly, I would forgive pretty much any gaming disasters from the guy who created Populous.
Now that I think about it, the only Bullfrog games I really liked were Populous and Populous II. Played the hell out of both. All the other games I bought and didn’t play. Powermonger, Magic Carpet, Syndicate, I just couldn’t overcome the learing curve. Even that Populous Expansion Pack (“The Promised Lands” if I recall) was extremely disappointing, really just some new skins for the same old game.
All this time I thought Bullfrog was great, but they actually just sold me the idea of their greatness without delivering more than once or twice.
Give Peter credit for a least thinking outside the box and being willing to talk about his future ideas (obviously much to willing from the viewpoint of his PR department. )
Populus was an excellent game, and Black & White was an excellent concept, but a mediocre game.
After seeing his talk at last years GDC about “The Movies”, I really wanted to buy it. Frankly, I don’t know if it is good or bad that we have no idea when (or if) it will be finished.
This is the first thing that came to my mind – two mirrors facing eachother.
:shock:
head asplode
And you can’t deny Magic Carpet the credit for being the only game ever (to my knowledge) that let you play in stereogram graphical mode. I wonder if anyone used that feature for longer than half a minute, but it was funny none the less.
Now, Rick, “not getting over the learning curve” for Syndicate strikes me as kind of sad. All you did in that game was, make your little people walk to a point on the map, switch them to autokill, and watch them mow down everything around them faster than you can follow. Mission accomplished.
In fact that game was the Dungeon Siege of its time.
Power Monger had incredible potential. I’d love to see that game be remade. In some ways it was noe of the first real time strategy games wasn’t it?
But it was such a disappointment after Populous. Plus it ran like molasses in winter on my Amiga 500 (and wouldn’t run at all on the faster A3000). Sigh.
Now, Rick, “not getting over the learning curve” for Syndicate strikes me as kind of sad. All you did in that game was, make your little people walk to a point on the map, switch them to autokill, and watch them mow down everything around them faster than you can follow. Mission accomplished.
In fact that game was the Dungeon Siege of its time.[/quote]
I cannot rule out my own lameness as a possibility with regard to Syndicate, but I just didn’t “get it”. I tend to like a little hand holding in my first hour or so of a game.** Syndicate just tossed me in there and expected me to swim. Maybe it’s time to fire up DosBox & give it another go.
** The high point in first hour experience for me is still the Warcraft II demo. I played that through in one sitting, finishing about 11:30pm, and then had to talk myself out of driving around looking for a 24-hour Wal-Mart that had it in stock.
You obviously werent around to experience populous, Magic Carpet and the other works of art Hes responsible for. If you had made that many fantastic gaems in a row youd have a pretty big ego too - and you’d have EARNED it.
1 or 2 failures out of 15 best-selling games - most of which were tremendous sucess and way more fun that what comes out today - is not bad.
The reaction in this thread is interesting, its as if the entire forums in concert decided to forget everything that happened in interactive entertainment before the Pentium II. I for one still have faith in Molenux, he does seem to have lost a bit since he left bullfrog (where he really was something like a star). Those that do remember are saying things I never heard back then - Magic Carpet, Poulous, Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park, Syndicate and Syndicate Wars had “high learning curves”? Maybe if you have the attention span of a goldfish
More people should make games the way Bullfrog used to
me too, I had the 2 demo original demo disc but from what I understand the sequel had better multiplayer. I also like everybody else enjoyed every second of the single player
and Syndicate Wars is almost as good as the original. I swear people are rewriting the history of Bullforg just to fit the cliched egomaniac picture of PM. - every game was being lauded as a work of genius when it actually came out, now they have high learning curves and are failed gameplay.
*ok Gene Wars was pretty bad, Ill admit that
*ok Gene Wars was pretty bad, Ill admit that
I still recall that Gene Wars had a fantastic dynamic monster generation capability. Sure, Impossible Creatures did it with spin and more flavor later on, but for its time, Gene Wars was a pretty cool play in the RTS genre.
Did Project Dimitri die a Microsoft death?
No, it didn’t. He talked about it fairly recently. They’re going to use whatever experimentation they were doing with Project Dimitri, and use it in their next project. I think it will be announced at E3, possibly.