Before there was Theme park, Theme Hospital, transport tycoon, hotel manager
and all the other management Games
There was Colony.
It is 2099 and humanity has had to colonise the stars due to lack of food.
A group of pitiful humans have been sent to a bleak cold inhospitable planet. If that was the only problem you'd be laughing but the planet is already inhabited and the natives are far from friendly.
A range of colony buildings have been set up and a fence has been erected.
You play the role of the colony maintenance droid. You must maintain and improve the fence, to protected the humans and their food. And talking of food which in this case comes in the form of mushrooms, you have to harvest that for the humans too.
If that wasn't enough you have to keep the colony supplied with power which comes in the form of solar panels which charge the main generator, not enough panels and things stop working usually because the aliens have eaten your panels. But too many panels and you can overload the generator and blow up the whole colony, which is bad.
The only silver lining in this situation is there is help if you harvest enough mushrooms you can sell them back to earth and use the money to buy useful stuff like metal fence panels, solar panels, death traps to kill them pesky aliens, seeds to grow more mushrooms, everything you could possibly want to make your colony a safer and better place to be. You can even buy a spare Maintenance droid just in case you make a big mistake.
The thing I really liked about this game is it was the first game where you were not told what to do or how to do it. You where given the scenario and just left to get on with it, there was no defined goal except, like life to survive and be able to keep going.
While there was no set tasks you quickly found out that there was plenty to be done how you did it was up to you for example
You could keep repairing the fence to stop the aliens getting in. Or if you preferred You could just keep running around killing them instead, the game wouldn't stop you. Well not till all your solar panels had been eaten and you ran out of power. But if you kept an eye on your power you'd be fine.
But equally you could aim to upgrade your fence to metal panels instead of the rubbish wood you start with. And just patrol the fence now and again to make sure it's ok.
What you did and how you managed your resources was completely up to you. This sort of open non linear game play is nowadays nothing special but back then it sucked me in and I really enjoyed trying to make my colony the best it could be. I spent all my time upgrading my fence to metal and then made a ring outside the fence of death traps so the aliens couldn't even reach my fence. So my little human charges were safe from harm and the aliens wouldn't be able to eat my mushrooms either. This required massive power, so everywhere I could I had to put a solar panel I didn't have to do it I could have just run around killing the aliens all the time and the game could have turned into a sort of shoot-em-up. I just chose to solve the problem the game puts to you that way around. In the end the game was and still is what you make of it and one I thoroughly enjoyed.
by Ealan Pearce 2007