

If you're under 30, you can just skip this entry. I think there's something down there about Viva Pinata or Mercenaries 2 you can go read. But if you're over 30 and you remember the days of yore before Peter Molyneux was the game developer equivalent of that weird uncle everyone humors during the holidays, I have one word for you: Populous. Now I have another word for you to put next to it: DS.
Xseed, a developer founded by former Square/Enix folks, just released new screenshots for Populous DS, the adaptation of Molyneux's classic for the Nintendo DS that no one had told me about. And while I have every expectation that something will go wrong somewhere -- my retro gamer heart has been broken too many times -- I can't help but get excited looking at the screenshots. Yep, that's Populous all right. Raising and lowering terrain while little people do their own thing.
It looks like you manage the terrain on the bottom screen, where there's also a minimap of the world. Meanwhile, everything happening is displayed on the top screen. There's 4-player multiplayer support (local only, it seems) and a 50-mission challenge mode.
The original Populous was Black & White before Black & White came out and ruined Black & White. It was a cool real time strategy game before real time strategy games were synonymous with Warcraft clones. This was the god game that started it all, but you had to use your followers to sway the world. You couldn't just dip your divine finger into the world and swat people around, Dungeon Keeper-style. You had to use prophets, diseases, disasters. And if you played Populous, you certainly remember the old trick of raising the terrain for your people's cities and then invoking a global flood, drowning all the unfaithful living in the lowlands. Good times. More games should let you use tactics from the Bible.
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