RPS Feature Hit Parade
An entirely objective ranking of the 50 best PC strategy games ever made, now brought up to date with the riches of the last two years. From intricate wargames to soothing peacegames, the broad expanse of the genre contains something for everyone, and we’ve gathered the best of the best. The vast majority are available to buy digitally, a few are free to download and play forever. They’re all brilliant.
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
The Last Great Management Game, at least of their first generation. (I’m not counting Dwarf Fortress, because Dwarf Fortress is so much more than that). A team partially composed of ex-Bullfrog guys was inevitably behind it, because that long-lost studio was very much the Lucasarts of management games, and if anything it shot for the stars even more than any Molyneux-led offering from that genre ever did. It’s just that Startopia quietly got on with it, I suppose.
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RPS Feature XCOM: Let's All Be Friends edition
‘Twas an odd coincidence that Startopia and Double Fine’s Spacebase DF-9 alpha arrived on Steam so hot on each other’s heels. The current paucity of activities in the latter would have had me hankering for the former even if a digital postman were not able to immediately deliver it to my hard drive – it’s one of few games I still have a hard copy of lurking on my shelf. Mucky Foot’s space station-set management game was something of an era-ender, the last great gasp of the Theme Park descendant genre as-was. We’re seeing a renaissance of sorts of now, with Prison Architect, Spacebase and the craven Godus, but the fully-formed, big budget age essentially ended with Startopia (though you could argue similar for the muddled Republic: The Revolution, a deeply strange Icarus of a game from Mucky Foot’s fellow post-Bullfrog offshot, Elixir.)
I’ve made Startopia my destination once again for the last couple of days, my first extensive revisit in many years, and I’m relieved to discover that it now exudes at least some of the timeless quality to be found in relative contemporaries such as Dungeon Keeper and Theme Park.
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Hello, faithful word-consumer. Would you care to also consume images this day? I have been replaying post-Bullfrog outfit Mucky Foot’s wonderful 2001 management game Startopia, which recently saw a re-release on Steam (as well as having been on GoG for some time prior to that). It took a bit of fiddling, but I managed to get it running at 2560×1440 with a ton of anti-aliasing and, well, my God. It’s absolutely beautiful to behold despite its 12 year vintage. Partly that’s down to judiciously characterfully artwork and a strong sense of scale, partly it’s because the game has an uncommonly liberated camera, able to go pretty much anywhere. I’m no Dead End Thrills, in a great many ways, but I’ve rounded up a collection of screenshots which somewhat demonstate how breathtaking this game is at high resolution. I really do think you should take a look.
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Startopia is the best management game you’ve never played. No, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to that other person, the one who didn’t play it. And especially to that other guy who never even heard of it. One of just three games created by taken-before-their-time Bullfrog offshot and Urban Chaos dev Mucky Foot, it took the Dungeon Keeper/Theme Park model to the stars, with greater complexity and nuance and grand galactic vistas to warm the cockles of one’s soul. Inevitably, it didn’t sell well. With slightly eerie timing, given we were only yesterday cooing at the inadvertently similar-in-concept Maia, this oft-forgotten space station sim has just been granted a new lease of life on GoG.
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Our assembly of the definitive list of the most important PC games of the last 150 years continues! On Monday Dr Rossignol talked us through his first instalment, with an eye for first-personly shoot-games. Yesterday saw a guest lecture from Professor John Walker detailing another fifth of our unambiguous inventory. What classics will we cover today? Ah! We must remember our manners. First, let us all thank Intel’s AppUp developer program for their generous sponsorship. Now, to business.
Do you miss Quinns? We miss Quinns. His gangly form is still making his way around the world with only a backpack and a delightful girlfriend to keep him safe. He may be gone, but is clearly not forgotten by Eurogamer, who’ve published a retrospective of Mucky Foot’s finest hour, Startopia. He says things like…
It was Babylon 5 run by the Muppets, which is about as flippant a comparison as the game itself.
Which certainly sounds like Quinns. Anyway, read more here and wish for Quinns to hurry on home. And while we’re talking Mucky Foot, I’m reminded of the article I wrote about their rise and fall a couple of years back. You can read that too.
A random law of blogging. Things lead to other things. In this case, my piece on Mucky Foot lead to Try.Lee in the Escapist’s comments thread pointing out Ex-Foot-programmer Tom Forsyth released a highly unofficial graphics patch for Startopia, illustrating some Shadowbuffer jiggerypokery we don’t quite understand. He suggests it runs too slow to play, but that was a few years ago, so hopefully the ever-marching power of PC will defeat that problem. He also stresses it’s VERY EXPERIMENTAL. Get it from here. Worth looking at the grabs, if only for Tom’s notes. I particularly approve of the rhapsody about GeForce-1 totting street urchins with tears running down their cheek at the end.
