POO: has peter molyneux ever made a good game?

list from wikipedia, i've cut out a couple i think he was minimally involved with (no syndicate, no magic carpet), i don't know about 'the movies' so if anyone has a defense of the molyneux corpus based on that particular keystone go ahead i guess

The Entrepreneur (1984) (designer/programmer)
Fusion (1987) (designer/programmer)
Populous (1989) (designer/programmer)
Powermonger (1990) (designer/programmer)
Populous II: Trials of the Olympian Gods (1991) (designer/programmer)
Theme Park (1994) (project leader/lead programmer)
Dungeon Keeper (1997) (project leader/designer)
Black & White (2001) (concept/Lead designer/programmer)
Fable (2004) (designer)
The Movies (2005) (executive designer)
Black & White 2 (2005) (lead designer)
Black & White 2: Battle of the Gods (2006) (lead designer)
Fable II (2008) (lead designer)
Fable III (2010) (lead designer)
Project Milo (formerly known as The Dmitri Project) (tech demo) (lead designer)
Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube? (2012)
Godus (2014) < -- lol

Populous (1989) (designer/programmer)
Dungeon Keeper (1997) (project leader/designer)

Very good

Fable (2004) (designer)
The Movies (2005) (executive designer)
Fable II (2008) (lead designer)

Good

Theme Park (1994) (project leader/lead programmer)
Black & White (2001) (concept/Lead designer/programmer)
Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube? (2012)

Noteworthy

loved theme park and to a lesser extent dungeon keeper, remember being incredibly excited anticipating black & white and then barely playing it

even populous i think is best conceptually; it's not better than simcity. dungeon keeper is the one i would single out. magic carpet is a masterpiece; didn't know that wasn't thoroughly in his column.

i defended him until curiosity/godus, on At Least He's Trying grounds, but seeing him stand in that white room plummily promising a teenager a vague godhood made it pretty hard to see him as anything other than a con man, even if he's his own mark

maybe i am not patient enough to put in the time to reach a level of mastery where i could enjoy his games but ime he promises a ton of stuff i wd love but then sticks me with a runaway game engine that doesn't give a shit whether i can actualy join it with it or not

except Fable, and that was killed by the stupid fucking bittiness of its play area plus shit combat mechanics

god i tried and tried with Powermonger but it refused to stop being an abstract demo of Cannon Fodder without the mission design

wow i have 25 years of Molyneux issues to work thru

i never played fable so i never quite got what the revolutionary gimmick was supposed to be

Fable is a role-playing video game where players control their character from a third person perspective. The main character, known as The Hero of Oakvale, can interact with people and objects as well as battle foes. The goal of Fable is to complete missions called quests that advance the game's plot, but Fable also features optional quests and allows players to pursue actions not directly tied to story completion.

go on

In Fable, a player's Hero has a measure of good or evil alignment based on the Hero's actions. Good deeds award good points, which produce a positive alignment, while committing evil acts adds evil points, producing a negative alignment.

yes...

Donations to the Temple of Avo will result in good points, while "gifts" to the Chapel of Skorm will result in evil points.

just like irl!

Fable's big gimmick was your alignment altered the way your character looked and how people reacted to you iirc

yeah i know

god help me a little bit of me still wants to look up an emulated Powermonger and give it another shot

another fable gimmick was coming out over a year after and on the same console as kotor

coming out years late isn't a gimmick with Molyneux, it's a feature

i'd never heard of powermonger, looks awesome lol. predates dune 2!

looks awesome, plays like shit

Electronic Gaming Monthly gave it a rave review, applauding the high detail of the simulation, the graphics, the "subtle" sound, and the enormous length of the campaign. They scored it 6.6 out of 10.

strange times

you-all are definitely not playing by the rules of the POO

in the spirit of peter molyneux we are all being radicals who think outside the box

by the rules of POO i would like to pick 0

in the spirit of peter molyneux we are all being radicals who think outside the box

http://i.imgur.com/3w1ej.gif

i have played >10 hours of all the bullfrog games except the populouses. i would pick magic carpet in a bullfrog POO but his contributions were apparently limited to:

i. in this flying game you're making ... what if you're on a carpet?
ii. no, stop making it steampunk.

these are really good contributions to be fair

-

powermonger has a really great early 16-bit / amiga-era euro-ass look to it

http://i.iinfo.cz/images/471/powermonger-9.png

and ... goes absolutely nowhere. it's a really minimal RTS/god sim thing, you have people and food and settlements which i think generate both and enemies who are trying to take over the map. it plays at a crawl, the math is fucked beyond belief (how about instead of taking over two towns for food, you ... kill a single wandering sheep), and every level is essentially the same

anyway that's probably my favorite of these games

-

i guess the two big bullfrog problems are:

-- interface is workmanlike and has some stupid glaring failures to prioritise -- the two big portraits hovering over the landscape are you and your opponent; on another map there'd be up to four. they disappear when you wipe out their troops. this, they decided, required ~20% of your screen space -- and is just totally un-fun to control or interact with
-- quasi-emergent features that are totally boring and add nothing in gameplay terms

i had to look up what they were, here we go

The game also features a fairly advanced (for its time) "artificial life" engine. Each person seems to have a mind of their own and will go about his or her job, fishing, farming, shepherding, collecting wood or making items without any input from the player. You also have a query tool that can be used to see the name, sex, age, allegiance, vital stats, hometown and equipment for any given person you click on.

this does not affect your attempt to kill the AI player's soldiers in any way

While the player cannot form the land like in Populous, actions can still have some limited effect on the environment. For example, if a large area is deforested, the weather pattern will change and more rain or snow (depending on season) will fall, making movement slower.

this does not affect your attempt to kill the AI player's soldiers in any way

sensible software arcade-i-fied the structure in mega lo mania (sic; i don't know why either) like a year later and that game i would gladly play through right now. it's actually fun! it has meaningful progression! you can't find out if the guys in the catapults are called 'clyde' or 'keith' though

http://thehouseofgames.org/files/m/mega_lo_mania/mega_lo_mania-2.gif

thank you, thank you, this is like a particularly traumatic therapy breakthrough. i thought i was alone.

lol @ powermonger interface, i thought it was a cutscene

dungeon keeper pretty hard to look at too tbh, if less unhinged in its use of space

http://www.bestoldgames.net/img/ss/dungeon-keeper/dungeon-keeper-ss5.png

guess this is 1997's fault more than molyneux's. a thing i might hate is tabbed interfaces in strategy games?

god dungeon keeper is an eyesore

right hand to slap minions: can't think of a more gratuitously icky and pointless thing they could have done ever. also the first person mode: why would you want to? (i mean, yes, it might be marginally more efficient in certain cases: but why would you want to: it just feels so unpleasant and clunky and tactilely off)

and the levels are all functionally the same! again! but with post-command-and-conquer unit type slow dripfeed, which is just the most boring kind of progression in the world.

populus is the only one, that i pick

Theme Park (1994) (project leader/lead programmer)
Dungeon Keeper (1997) (project leader/designer)

the best 3 years of his career. the movies was fun too. he didn't work on theme hospital?

fyi the movies was just theme hospital or theme park but at a movie studio and you hire actors + staff and build sets and film movies and there was an editing suite and if you wanted to you could release your movies online. and you started in the black and white era and moved through film history.

so Fable got a lot of press for having the good/evil alignment system, which would affect the character's physical appearance and NPC's reactions to the character. but obviously alignments were used long before Fable, in videogames and D&D and the like. so why did he get a bunch of credit for that? for adding the physical appearance change aspect of it? that's it?

he didn't work on theme hospital?

he was "consultant" apparently, which could mean anything, but prob suggests minimal involvement

so Fable got a lot of press for having the good/evil alignment system, which would affect the character's physical appearance and NPC's reactions to the character. but obviously alignments were used long before Fable, in videogames and D&D and the like. so why did he get a bunch of credit for that?

never played Fable but the thing about alignments reminded me of how the Ultima games had made a big deal of the concept that NPCs would treat you differently if your play style did not embody the Virtues, or according to which virtues you'd practised more (NB the Ultima games I had most time for were the Ultima Underworlds, where the whole virtue thing was more or less ignored, so I don't know how much difference it actually made)

anyway I remain ILX's biggest Populous stan and will vote for that obv, though I concede it has flaws, including the control system

I'd be curious to know how much the tiny play area in Powermonger was due to technical restrictions and how much was due to... whatever the other option is

my brother and i both tried to go back to dungeon keeper recently. i found the controls in 2015 to be unbearable and unplayable but he went through the entire thing again. it's funny how certain ways of playing games + UI's make sense for the time but you go back to them and you've just become too accustomed to modern presentations of game to even enjoy it w/out getting a headache.

I had a CD with Populous II and Powermonger on it, but I couldn't get into either of them. P2 was one of those "look at all the shit we put in here!" things without much challenge. I didn't understand what was going on in Powermonger.

The demo for Dungeon Keeper was fun.

I haven't played his modern games.

Is there anything in the RTS continuum that has controls that feel tactilely good? is it a necessary failure of the genre?

thinking of pro Starcraft players and the RSI nightmare of the way they manipulate the keyboard

but like MOBAs in 2016 seem like they have zero feel to them. zero ~friction~

i think part of my hatred for Molyneux belongs within the context of a broader dislike of RTS games now you come to mention it

dungeon keeper 9/10
populous 8/10
fable 7/10

i probably played theme park more than any 2 of these games put together but reflecting back now it was just compulsion. i think i actually hated it.

one day you will look back and realize you felt the same way about those three games. one day. i promise u

I enjoyed Godus. The new one (The Trail) not so much, but that game is v smart about when to show ads.

i watched a 4-part documentary on this man in an effort to understand all the hate that gets thrown his way. i'm still confused. it seems to boil down to a handful of features that were promised and cut out of games. the prolonged nerd rage against him is baffling.

funny that this thread came up today, i have got stuck in my head that i really want to play mega lo mania.

no i dont think so

i played it like half of yesterday :/

what version? i loved the amiga (or poss c64) version but hard to find an easy-to-use emulator for it. pc version was too ugly and didn't fit my memories

pc version, just because easier. it is ugly.

I started playing the first Fable a couple of years ago... Of course at this point it's hard to see what (if anything) was originally so revolutionary about it, but it has pretty good controls and a fun battle system, a cool story, characters that don't feel like fantasy cliches, and great-looking visuals that are colourful and cartoony (in a good way) and not in the "reality is grey and brown" mode that more recent action RPGs seem to favour. It basically comes closer than any other games that I've played in capturing that magical feeling I got from the 1990s Legend of Zelda games.

As for the whole alignment thing, even Fable hardly pioneered it, the simple but effective way it's presented does work remarkably well. And it feels that choosing the "evil" option is often made into a more tempting and sensible alternative than in some other games, where choosing the "good" path is often too easy and too obvious (unless you deliberately want to play an asshole).