 It's difficult to talk about a game like Populous in a way that can be summed up in a 3 or 4 minute video. This was one of if not THE first game of its kind where you play as God, and it was created by the now infamous Peter Molyneux. It's also one of the very first releases for the SNES in North America, and one of the system's first attempts at porting a PC game, so you have to take a lot of context into consideration here. When this game was created for the Amiga in 1989, there just weren't many other games like it, or even close to it, other than maybe SimCity. Also, when Populous was ported to the Super Nintendo in September 1991, PC ports were very hit or miss on the SNES in general, but a PC port back when the system was first getting off the ground for a game this ambitious, yeah it's a little rough around the edges. So to get this out of the way quickly, if you want the ultimate Populous experience you're better off playing the Amiga game, or the version currently available on gog.com instead of the SNES port. That should be pretty obvious. Anyway, Populous is a real-time strategy game made back when that was barely even a thing. There's a good god pitted against an evil god, and you can choose to be either. You face off in a gigantic series of tons upon tons of different scenarios, and the goal is to smite your enemies and wipe them off the face of the earth. As god, you're responsible for, well, just about everything, as you could probably guess. You direct people's migration, raise an army, and start wars, as well as manipulate weather and terrain, which includes creating traumatic events like floods and earthquakes. The world map is in the upper left, the blue and white colors are the good guys, and the red and dark gray colors are the bad guys. At first, your job as god is to manipulate the terrain around your people to put them in a position to succeed. This means getting everything as flat as possible in order to encourage development. The A button raises the land, and the B button lowers it. And as you can see, everything moves very slowly here, including the cursor. Just moving from point to point on the grid here seemingly takes forever. It does help that you can hold the L button when pressing A or B to flatten larger areas. But no, unfortunately this game is not compatible with the SNES mouse since it came long before that existed, but a mouse peripheral would have really helped here. Anyway as your people develop, pretty soon you start to see these big castles pop up, and the more followers you have, the more power you as god will have, as represented by the mana bar in the upper right of the screen. The mana bar enables you to use all sorts of god powers, the basic power obviously is raising and lowering the land, but you can create mountains and earthquakes which completely screw up your opponent's arrangement. But just press the select button to access the buttons on the lower left and lower right. You can also eventually create knights and summon them to fight. Once you pass the first world, there's all sorts of goofy worlds you lord over like evil cake land? Okay sure. There's also stuff like Pigland and Revolutionary France. The themes are all over the place, which honestly is probably this port's biggest strength. The design here is so goofy I can't help but enjoy it. Now as far as strategy goes, I'm probably the last person to ask about that because I really wasn't able to conjure up a surefire way to win battles. I mean I just raised the land until our two islands met, created knights and had them fight and summoned natural disasters and stuff. I'm sure there's more clever ways to go about battles, but I wasn't able to figure out what to do beyond that. There's a pretty substantial option screen here as well, where you can do things like turn water to fatal, so the water would instantly kill your enemy, which would make it a little easier for you. But yeah, usually with early SNES games like this, I say something like, well they did the best they could for the time, but for populace, I wouldn't even say that. I just call this one a bad decision to port it at the time they did. If you really want to play a populace game on Super Nintendo, you're much better off with populace 2, Trials of the Olympian Gods, which was only released in PAL regions and was never released in North America on SNES anyway. But that port enables the use of the SNES mouse, which makes the game so much easier to manage. There's also a Genesis port of the first game, but it's surprisingly even slower than the SNES port, so I'd avoid that one too. And of course there's a port on the original Game Boy. Oh my god, look at this. I can't help but laugh when I see this. I admire the hell out of the bravery of the developers, but geez, this is limited. But yeah, as far as the port of the first populace game, skip it. It's too slow, too unintuitive, and too confusing. I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing in terms of gameplay and strategy here, and maybe there is a decent game buried in this port somewhere, and I just can't see it, but populace is one of those games that the Super Nintendo is just not equipped to give justice to properly, so play it on the PC instead.