How approachable is the original Populous compared to modern offerings like "The Beginning" from 1998? I know that some games don't age well - even classics - so I thought I'd ask. The original game was released in 1989, after all, so it's over 20 years old!

Thank you very much for any information and opinions!

EDIT: I suppose a better thread title would have been "How does it hold up?" Sorry about that.

1st off... Populous the Beginning sucked.. This is the orig. It was better on Snes since it added a button for "auto build castle" but yes. The 1st one ages well, still simple and fun. Populous 2 adds more variety and fun per level. The 1st one was just good and consistent. It doesnt get old and still to this day nothing really matches up to old Bullfrog games.

You will enjoy this. =) It can get hard however!

I would compare it to Lemmings - the principles are very simple and easy to get into, but the actual execution may be very tricky (I remember I could never pass the levels around 180 or so back then). I cannot compare the game to The Beginning, as I only got to play that when games pretty much lost their appeal for me. On the other hand, I just had one quick game of Populous and it was still fun. Brought back memories long forgotten...

I played it again today for a couple hours for the 1st time in .... 15-ish years !

The basic gameplay holds up almost perfectly, it's clean, simple (but complex) and the interface works well, you do need to deliver some high "click-per-minute" action to keep things under control but nothing too bad

Longer-term, I suspect an element of boredom will set-in, (was the same in the old days, except at the time we had nothing else to play or our boredom threshold was higher !) and obviously the novelty factor no longer exists.

It remains a fun and challenging game and like the original x-com makes you realise how much of a golden age this period was and the brilliance of some of the developers/designers at the time.

In any case, highly recommended if only to see the genius of P Molyneux at work