Shock! Gasp! It’s a game released AFTER 1996!
This game was made by a studio that had garnered a bit of a bad reputation after the Ph.D.s who staffed it claimed they could write an infinite polygon engine. Unfortunately their first game didn’t impress anyone with its graphics. This was the second and last game they made.
Name and developer, please!
Evil Genius, Elixir Studios.
Good game, pity about their crazy infinite polygons/perfect city simulation claims on Republic!
Woo, fast. Gratz!
Evil Genius had a couple big problems that made playing it a frustrating experience. And both of those problems could have been easily fixed. First, there’s no way to speed time, and it takes forever for a lot of things to happen. Second, every person who infiltrates your base must be personally “tagged” by you before your minions/henchmen will interact with them. So the game becomes a long boring session punctuated with bouts of frantic clicking as you try to correctly tag all the infiltrators in your base.
Darn! I recognized it, too! I remember playing it and thinking, “Wait a minute…I’ve played this before back when I was keeping a dungeon!”
Now I have to look up this infinite polygon thing.
Quoth from the Republic FAQ:
(http://old.gameplanet.co.nz/mag.dyn/Features/1824.html)
9. What has happened to the Infinite poly engine?
The Totality engine is the same as it as has always been, apart from improvements and optimisations. We don’t use the term infinite polygon engine any more as pedantic tech-heads used to complain about the exact meaning of the word ‘infinite’. Totality is a continuous level of detail engine. This means that there is no theoretical upper limit to the number of polys than can be used in a scene (this is what we meant in the original Edge article by the use of the word ‘infinite’). However, there are production constraints and art constraints in terms of actually creating artwork that has that much detail in it. We had to draw the line somewhere else we would have building art assets for an infinite amount of time!
I find it funny that a lot of websites talked about Evil Genius as being so innovative. Wasn’t it pretty much the same as Dungeon Keeper with a different theme? I am not saying it was bad. I loved playing it. I just thought, “Oh, cool, I know how to play this” and it had a few new things, but it wasn’t an original type of game at all.