Ah, finally, you
have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this. The award for the
hardest game so far to play goes to, Utopia. A 1982 strategy game
developed by Don Daglow for the Intellivision.
I thought Sokoban
was hard to find? This game was near impossible. First, it's an
Intellivision game, meaning that I needed to find a whole new
emulator to play this game. Preferably one that's been updated since
2005. Second, with Intelivision, it's apparently illegal to include
the BIOS files with the emulators, meaning that you have to find them
separately. Let me tell you, these are NOT easy to find. Intelivision
is a fairly obscure system now-days, so support for emulators is
fairly limited. I searched maybe a dozen rom sites and downloaded
some shady stuff that probably gave me spyware, and I still couldn't
find those damn BIOS files, rendering the entire emulator completely
usless! But it doesn't stop there, unlike Sokoban, this game has not
been ported to many other systems. In fact, back in the day, it was
only released on the Intelivision, and the Mattel Aquarius, a home
computer that was so unsuccessful that it was discontinued only four
months after it's release. But it was my saving grace when it game to
this game. I found an Aquarius emulator, and Utopia was bundled right
in with the ZIP file! The quality was terrible, and a manual for this
rather complex game was completely nonexistent, but hey, I was
finally able to play the first real time SIM game.
So how does this
game work? Well, you use one half of the keyboard to control one
cursor, and the second half of the keyboard to control the other
cursor. This game is multilayer only, and while playing alone for a
high score is possible, it's just not very fun. The object of the
game is to accumulate as many points as possible before the end of
your term as set by you at the beginning. You accumulate points by
having happy, plentiful residents. You can make your island residents
happy by buying a lot of amenities that they might need such as
fishing boats, crop fields, factories, hospitals, schools, etc. Keep
your residents happy, and your population will rise, make them upset,
and they'll start to rebel, lowering your score and possibly even
destroying buildings.
So how is it? How is
the first real-time SIM game? Eh, it was okay. Although it really
wasn't the game's fault here, I had such a hard time figuring out the
controls and what the HUD meant that it just really sucked me right
out of the experience. Once I finally got the hang of the basic
controls, I found that it was nearly impossible to collect money to
expand your island. A rain cloud must pass over your crops to earn
money from them, and your fishing boat must be anchored over a school
of fish to make money. Neither of which are easy to do, especially
when you can't figure out the button that allows you to steer the
boat. The graphics on the port are terrible, even compared to the
Intellivision's lackluster display. At least the colors are nice to
look at.
Overall, this was a
valiant effort, and was a great attempt at something new. It was the
birth of a new genre and I can easily see why it was on the list.
While it may not be perfect, and I can't honestly recommend it, I
still appreciate the effort and attention to detail that went into
creating this game.
Normally this game
would be where we wrap up 1982, but I still have one more from this
year, a request, from my own Mom actually. Normally I don't accept
requests as 1001 is a daunting enough challenge as is, but because
I'm not going to count GORF as a game that I must play before I die,
I'm substituting it for the game that should have been on the list.
Next up: Sinistar
