FreeCol [Freeplay]
October 25, 2007 by Peter Berger
In 1998, director Gus Van Sant remade Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in a particularly unusual manner: he filmed a shot-for-shot remake. Critical opinion was divided on whether Van Sant’s work was an homage, a rip-off, or simply an exercise in pointlessness.
In the world of video games, the equivalent to Van Sant’s work are the free versions of classic games. FreeCiv is the most well known, but there are efforts at free versions of X-Com, Master of Orion, and the subject of today’s column, Colonization.
It’s fairly easy to be snide about this. “Wouldn’t it be great to have a game that is just like this other brilliant game, only I didn’t have to pay for it?” Truthfully, though, these games don’t exist just out of a desire to save money. Largely, they originate because the developers wanted to play the games on some non-Windows platform.
Like its cousin 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?