FreeCol [Freeplay]
25. Oktober 2007 vorbei Peter Berger
1998 remade Direktor Gus Van Sant Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho in einer besonders ungewöhnlichen Weise: er filmte schießen-für-schoß Remake. Kritische Meinung wurde an geteilt, ob Van Sants Arbeit eine Ehrerbietung, eine Gaunerei oder einfach eine übung in der Nutzlosigkeit war.
In der Welt der videospiele, sind das äquivalent Van Sants zur Arbeit die freien Versionen der klassischen Spiele. FreeCiv ist das weithin bekannteste, aber es gibt Bemühungen an den freien Versionen von X-COM, Meister von Orionund das Thema der heutigen Spalte, Besiedlung.
Es ist ziemlich einfach, snide über dieses zu sein. „Würde nicht es groß sein, ein Spiel, das wie dieses andere leuchtende Spiel gerecht ist, nur I zu haben mußte nicht für es zahlen?“ Truthfully obwohl, diese Spiele nicht gerade aus einem Wunsch heraus, Geld zu sparen bestehen. Groß entstehen sie, weil die Entwickler die Spiele auf irgendeiner NichtWindows Plattform spielen wollten.
Wie sein Vetter FreeCiv, FreeCol suffers from a user interface that is somewhat clunky, unattractive, and only minimally planned out. A slightly more central problem, however, is that the original Colonization wasn’t that great a game to begin with. Most of its charm was in its graphic design and implementation, very little of which makes it into FreeCol’s implementation. So in this case, it’s as if Gus Van Sant decided to remake Herbie The Love Bug.
The game is a faithful remake of Colonization, and so it clearly met its own objective. From my perspective, though, the tragedy is that they didn’t take the opportunity to move beyond a simple reimplementation, and actually improve on its inspiration.
If you’re one of the seven people who were addicted to Colonization in the mid-1990’s and want to play it on a modern system then FreeCol is the answer to your prayers. For the rest of us, however, it is more of a curiosity than a work of art. But then, I didn’t like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho very much either.
FreeCol, for Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and any platform that supports the full Java 1.5 VM. Free download from http://www.freecol.org.
First I would like to say the review was well written. The comparison with Gus Van Sant’s movie is quite appropriate for the current state of the game. I feel, however, compelled to comment some of the statements concerning the future development of the game. The article might seem to be based on information from the game’s authors or website, which is clearly not the case.
> “Largely, they originate because the developers wanted
> to play the games on some non-Windows platform.”
Wow, I didn’t know that was the reason for my work on FreeCol. I always thought that hopeless outdated graphics and no plans for a sequel was the main reasons… Thanks for enlighting me!
> “FreeCol suffers from a user interface that is somewhat clunky,
> unattractive, and only minimally planned out.”
Well, the interface will be improved. The game is not nearly ready, you know. Try reviewing an alpha-version of commercial software
http://www.freecol.org/roadmap.html
> The game is a faithful remake of Colonization, and so it clearly
> met its own objective.
That’s not our objective at all. We will extend the game to contain new features and gameplay. This is clearly stated on:
http://www.freecol.org/about.html
And for any visitor - try comparing screenshots of FreeCol with Colonization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier’s_Colonization
I would dare to say not just outdated graphics and no sequel but new features based on the community ideas!
“If you?re one of the seven people who were addicted to Colonization in the mid-1990?s and want to play it on a modern system then FreeCol is the answer to your prayers”
One of the seven? Just tell me where you get that?