Outpost Video Games
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 Rating: - The game that changed the reviewer paradigm
OUTPOST

Synopsis:
Outpost follows a colony settled on an alien planet by survivors of Earth after a rogue asteroid destroyed it. The player takes control of the colony from initial settlement, choosing what supplies to start out with (that were brought on the colony ship) trying to balance growth with the needs of the colony to survive. Later in the game, a rebel faction breaks away, competing for resources. Outpost can be best described as an almost pure colony simulation game. Players must build a colony by building and placing different types of structures, balancing colonist needs and population growth with the available resources.

Review:
Outpost is a game with a little bit of notoriety. Published by Sierra Online for DOS, Windows and Macs in 1994, the game received strong reviews from gaming magazines at the time. The reviews were based on betas that they were shown by the developer. The betas were not complete, and developers misled the gaming magazines about what the game would include. This resulted in wildly inaccurate reviews. Most notoriously, PC-gamer rated it at 93%, which was the highest rating the magazine had ever given to a game to that time. Other magazines followed this trend.

What the consuming public got was a lot less than had been promised. Due to time pressures, the game was released minus significant features that were shown or promised to game reviewers, and with serious bugs the severly hampered gameplay. Customers who bought the game based on the reviews became irate at the gaming magazines, resulting in PC-Gamer completely revising how they did reviews. Almost all gaming magazines, online or otherwise, now review the complete and final product rather than developer provided betas. Outpost is one of the reasons.

Patches were released for the game (though this was before the internet was common and 3.5" floppy disks were still common) and some of the issues were resolved, though the cut features were never added, even in later rereleases of the game. Surprisingly enough, it was successful enough to spawn a sequel and a fan following even 14 years after its initial release.

Outpost is a mediocre game, though its unique gameplay focusing on colony management gave it something of a fan following. For it's age, it has moderate complexity, but there's only so many times a person can play it before its flaws become glaring. I remember originally playing it and wondering what all the hype was. It was incredibly boring and monotonous, and it seemed to have no end game, at least not that I ever saw.

Added to that, replaying recently it has revealed that it has not aged well as a strategy simulation. The faults and production cuts that haunted it have become even more glaring with the passage of time. Games that followed after it with similair concepts such as Sid Meier's Alpha Centari were far better and more playable. I'd suggest looking that one up as an alternative.

I own the DOS version of this game, in one of the rereleases. I've had a heck of a time trying to get it to work under dosbox, so if you're not knowledgable about using dosbox (A 386/486 computer emulator available for free online), you might find getting this game to work to be quite daunting. I have no idea how it works under windows, but a search to the web reveals that there are a few fan websites still in existance which provide installation instructions for Windows XP.

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