In 1999 the family had had our Windows 95 PC for about a year. It was still a reasonably new thing in our household to have a home computer, so there was still a lot of novelty attached to using it. One birthday I got this game Evolution: The Game of Intelligent Life.
I said my thank yous as pleasantries to spare my parent's feelings because one look at the box and I knew right away I was looking at an easy-peasy educational point and click game. I had 0 expectations from it because I was a dinosaur fanatic and I knew right away that the anatomy of the dinosaur on the box was incorrect. I had educational games in my collection and I had outgrown them all, and these 'games' were never usually games at all and I thought this would be the same. I was very wrong.
I started this game one night because I thought 'may as well try this once' and I was clueless. It took me days to get the hang of what to do but once I had figured it out I was hooked from then on. Basically it's a real-time strategy game where you start off with an ancient amphibian species and multiply and evolve for the highest score while also trying to wipe your opponents off the map. The game ends when one of the 5 sentient species is evolved or a scenario ends. The continents move around the map and climates change as the game progresses and there are natural disasters to wipe out your beasties. There are parts of this game that are not too different from Civilization, actually, though it is a lot simpler and not turn based.
I really, really miss this game. I still enjoy it. It wasn't popular, I don't think. A lot of people found it very boring. I found it relaxing and challenging. I don't have the disc any more (I lost it very recently, and I didn't have it installed when I lost it), but I managed to find a copy online. It's notoriously hard to get to work on any windows OS that's XP or later. I did get my disc copy to work on Windows 7 (back when I still had it), but my downloaded version just refuses to work. I had to tinker around a lot using advice I'd found online just to get it to open the game set-up screen, but now when the new game opens it stops responding and needs to close. I've pretty much given up trying to get it to work.
Anyway, I just remember it being a game that while a little boring at times, really challenged me. The AI could be quite difficult to beat. I loved the branching factor too, where you could branch out to many different species while trying to block your opponent's evolutionary paths.
Does anybody else remember this game? Did you like it? Hate it?
I said my thank yous as pleasantries to spare my parent's feelings because one look at the box and I knew right away I was looking at an easy-peasy educational point and click game. I had 0 expectations from it because I was a dinosaur fanatic and I knew right away that the anatomy of the dinosaur on the box was incorrect. I had educational games in my collection and I had outgrown them all, and these 'games' were never usually games at all and I thought this would be the same. I was very wrong.
I started this game one night because I thought 'may as well try this once' and I was clueless. It took me days to get the hang of what to do but once I had figured it out I was hooked from then on. Basically it's a real-time strategy game where you start off with an ancient amphibian species and multiply and evolve for the highest score while also trying to wipe your opponents off the map. The game ends when one of the 5 sentient species is evolved or a scenario ends. The continents move around the map and climates change as the game progresses and there are natural disasters to wipe out your beasties. There are parts of this game that are not too different from Civilization, actually, though it is a lot simpler and not turn based.
I really, really miss this game. I still enjoy it. It wasn't popular, I don't think. A lot of people found it very boring. I found it relaxing and challenging. I don't have the disc any more (I lost it very recently, and I didn't have it installed when I lost it), but I managed to find a copy online. It's notoriously hard to get to work on any windows OS that's XP or later. I did get my disc copy to work on Windows 7 (back when I still had it), but my downloaded version just refuses to work. I had to tinker around a lot using advice I'd found online just to get it to open the game set-up screen, but now when the new game opens it stops responding and needs to close. I've pretty much given up trying to get it to work.
Anyway, I just remember it being a game that while a little boring at times, really challenged me. The AI could be quite difficult to beat. I loved the branching factor too, where you could branch out to many different species while trying to block your opponent's evolutionary paths.
Does anybody else remember this game? Did you like it? Hate it?
