FreeCol [Freeplay]

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.