h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What's Black and White?

It's a game. A very, very good one. It's being ported to Linux as well

You play a God. You have some worshippers. There are other Gods in the world - you can, if you wish, steal their worshippers by converting them to believing in you. Or you can kill them all. You can kill all your own worshippers if you _really_ want.

There are very few limits on what you can do - if you fancy inspiring belief in another village by burning half of it down with fireballs, then that's what you can do. Or you could throw rocks at it, or pick the people up and throw them in the sea. Or you could give them food, water their crops, provide them with wood, nuture their forests and generally be nice to them.

The interface is quite unusual, making much use of gesture-based navigation to select Miracles and so forth. And it's just gorgeous...

Sounds like Populous to me.

One game like that that I really liked was Mega-Lo-Mania, but I think there was only ever a Megadrive version

No, it's different to Populous, although I don't know all that much about it...

Still, no matter what it sounds like, it's very, very good.

Actually, it sounds exceptionally similar to Populous, except that you can't throw rocks at the enemy AFAIK. You can drown people in Popuous though, if the enemy god's not looking, and the 'water is fatal' option is on, or (in Pop 2) if you create Helen of Troy. I haven't tried Pop 3. I've seen B&W on the shelves at Smiths and PC World, but my brother was more interested in Championship Manager 00/01.

He also borrowed Sim City 3000, which I'm currently engrossed in (when I'm at home, anyway - obviously not now).

Do you know of any shops that stock the Linux version of Civ 3? (I already have a copy of the multiplayer-only FreeCiv, but I have no-one to play with ) And is there a Linux version of Civ 4?

Oh, and you can also create 'baptismal fonts' which reverse the allegiance of anyone falling into them. But I haven't got that far.

1) Civ3's only just come out, isn't it a bit soon for Civ4?
2) Go to the LinuxGames website and from there you should be able to find various links to various places that sell Linux games by post
3) Black and White is somewhat similar in concept to Populous, but I believe it's a bit more free-form
4) FreeCiv can be played single-player if you set up your server to add some AI players. I think the command at the server prompt is
ai fill x
Where x is the number of players you want to have - any slots out of this number that aren't occupied by humans will become AI. The command may be wrong though - I've not played FreeCiv for a while.

1) The original Civilization was just Civilization (and I have a copy of it!). Much more famous, popular and successful was Civ 2. Then came Civilization: Call to Power, effectively Civ 3. Currently on the shelves is Civilization: Call to Power 2, effectively Civ 4. That's what I meant. (I've played only the first, unfortunately.)
2) Whoops, I'm too young to get a credit card. And I only have about £4 anyway. Ah well, some other day. But I'll look, just to see what's there.
3)Probably. I haven't even seen it running, so I probably shouldn't comment.
4)Thanks, if I ever get round to working out how to start the server (and don't bother telling me).

What's Age of Empires like?

Hey, you failed to mention the best thing about B&W -- the creature! You can show and teach the creature stuff like how to help the villagers gather food (or eat them, if you want it to be evil). When it does stuff you want it to do, you stroke it gently, and when it misbehaves, you slap it. Brilliant.

True, but the tiger is so stupid it's almost impossible to teach it anything interesting - although it's a great one to have if you want to be really evil.

Civ: Call to Power wasn't really Civ3 because it was made by a different company. Call to Power 2 doesn't have the Civilisation part in the title because the original guys got it back and prevented them from doing it. Thus Sid Meier's Civilisation 3 is the true Civilisation 3, even though there may seem to be two others in between it and Civ2. Of course, Alpha Centauri shouldn't be discounted

Microprose (Sid Meier) and Activision (not Sid Meier) brought out games called Civ at about the same time, I think - hence the dispute. Also, I think Peter Molneux put together both Populous, and Black & White, hence the similarities. I think he also did Syndicate...

Btw, MaW, that's a grand program you've cobbled together there. I haven't used it a lot, but it's helped me already.

DG

It's got lots of bugs in syntax highlighting that need fixing. But the rest of it's fine, I believe.

Oh, I see. I stand corrected.

How about a GuideML mode for Vim? I'll write one if I get the time.

One of these days I'm going to learn emacs-Lisp and write a GuideML mode for that, because I'm an Emacs person. I don't get on with vi or vim, although that doesn't stop me appreciating their features. but Emacs has (more than) everything I need, and I know how to use it, so until I get around to learning how to use vi...

Uuuuuhhhh.... Escape Meta Alt Control Shift? There are beter web browsers around, you know

Whoops, better not start a holy war...

Does Emacs really have so many features that you could use it as your login shell?

Pretty much, yes. It depends what you want to do with it, but if all you do is software development in C++ or something like that, then yes!

It's not good enough for me to use as my login shell as I use X too much. Thankfully Emacs is blissfully X-aware

I really should try vim one day though, if only because it's useful to know how to use it in situations where Emacs isn't available.

I ought to try Emacs too...

What sort of Emacs do you use? Surely not vanilla GNUmacs, since that doesn't do colour, let alone syntax highlighting.

Doesn't it? Oh yes it does. Running GNU Emacs under X (so using X mode), I get syntax highlighting, auto-identation etc. etc. Sometimes you have to turn them on (it's called font lock for some reason, and it's under Help->Options, or I believe the keystoke M-x followed by typing 'turn-on-font-lock' and hitting enter will also do it, but I never tested that) but they're there!

I don't know if it can do it on the console, but I would think there must be some way to persuade it. I shall have to experiment!

Well, I read in LXF that it didn't do colour. Oh well.

Back onto the original topic, I've recently been playing the demo of Populous 3 that came with Sim City 3000. It seems more like RTS than your 'traditional' god-game, but a pretty good one. (You actually tell your followers what to do, and your shaman casts spells within a finite radius.)

Sounds interesting.

I've been having fun playing Emperor: Battle for Dune instead.