You are a Blob Monster in a survival of the fittest world. The green fruits on the right are Stinkballs - a food you are adapted to. Left below you is a female of your species waiting to mate with you. Left is a walking fish competing with you for your territory.
Q-Pop is a turn-based strategy/evolution simulator game that was released in 1995 for 16-Bit Windows by the German developer KIWI. In the game you play a species on an alien planet, that has to eat, reproduce and fight off predators and competitors. The goal is, to become the most evolved species after a time limit, or be the only surviving species in an unlimited game.
In 1996 Kiwi released a very similar game about robots named Magnetic Planet as shareware advertisement game for the Japanese corporation TDK (who were big in the floppy disk business back then). Magnetic Planet can be considered as a shareware demo for Q-Pop.
In 2006 Kiwi (who are out of business) and the new copyright holder granted permission to fans to release the game as freeware. It is now legal abandonware. You can get it here: https://www.frunit.de/qpop/index.php
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Q-Pop allows single-player or local hotseat multiplayer gameplay. The round limit can be 5, 10 or 20 rounds, or "to the bitter end".
Every round consist out of several game phases:
Reproduction round
The players can put their children from the survival round on the world map, to increase their population. The vegetation on map tiles affects the food available in the survival round. Players can fight, by trying to move units on tiles occupied by other players. Here the game also begins with 10 units.Catastrophy round
A random Catastrophy happens. This includes a meteor strike, volcano eruptions, heat- or coldwave, disease and more. You can also get visited by humans.Ranking round
The species' are ranked by their evolution score and are assigned evolution points depending on their current population. Here you also can save or load the game.Evolution round
The Players can assign evolution points to different stats that affect the gameplay. This includes adaptions to different food types, reproductive rate or camouflage.Survival round
You control one of your animals in a rougelike level, there you have to eat enough food, have sex with females and avoid getting killed by predators. If you don't eat enought food, or get killed, you loose units on the world map. Having sex gives you children who can be placed in the next reproduction round. The gameplay is turn-based, but there is a time limit per turn.Q-Pop provides examples of:
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Tropes found in Q-Pop
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: One of death animations of the human has him in his underwear, but that doesn't kill him.
- Big Ball of Violence: This is that covers fights (and sex scenes). The file is called LOVEWAR.DAT.
- Broken Faceplate: Another death animation for the human.
- Edible Collectible: In the survival mode you find eatable plants. Which ones depends on climate, and the nutritional value depends on your stats.
- Eating the Enemy: One of the death animations for the mushroom turns it into a tin of mushroom soup. Of course this is also that the predators do with you.
- Enemy-Detecting Radar: The Mini Map in the survival phase shows predators, females, competitors and rich food sources. It's range can be increased by investing evolution points in your senses. In Magnetic Planet it is probably an actual RADAR.
- Express Delivery: There is no pregnancy animation. Having sex just replaces the female animation with a female with child animation. Thought the Kiwiopteryx has a hatching animation.
- Gameplay Roulette: As said above, each round consists of several phases, where the reproduction phase and the survival phase are the main game.
- Humanoid Female Animal: The females may wear lipstick and eyelashes. The female Chuckberry wears even a bra (and the child has diapers).
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: One disaster is that humans land on the planet, and appear as additional predator in the survival round. This continues until their base is destroyed by another disaster.
- Instant Bandages: One of the death animation has the dinosaur bandages and is crying
- Leitmotif: Every one of the six species has one. It is MIDI music.
- Multiple Endings: Every species has its own ending cut scene that shows it evolved to a sapient species in the far future, and there is also a Downer Ending when all are extinct.
- Non-Mammal Mammaries: The only playable mammal is the Purplus and the female one has a realistic udder. The others (bird, fish, insect, Blob Monster and fruit) have human breasts.
- Our Monsters Are Weird:
- The playable herbivores:
- Purplus: A pink cow with eyestalks and a green tongue.
- Kiwiopteryx: A green ostrich-like bird, that eats through a trunk.
- Pesciodyphus: A blue and orange fish on legs. The children need water to breath.
- Isnobug: A bipedal fly with red and white stripes.
- Amorph: A green Blob Monster with pink spots and six eyestalks.
- Chuckberry: A strawberry that moves by jumping, and eats through the top of its head.
- The predators:
- Dinosaur: A yellow bipedal lizard with a pink mohawk.
- Mushroom: A mushroom with eyes and teeth that walks on tentacles.
- Elektro plant/snake: A green electric plug with eyes, that is burrowed in sand, and attacks you randomly for a Surprisingly Sudden Death.
- The playable herbivores:
- Optional Sexual Encounter: Not really optional, you have to have sex to survive.
- Power-Up Food: The Superfood is some kind of mushroom, that makes you invincible for this survival round, so you can kill the predators.
- Shout-Out:
- Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: The Story of Q-Pop is that captain James T. Quirk drops remains of his food on the Genesis Planet and the food grows into new species.
- Planet of the Apes: Captain Quirk spends a long time in hypersleep and sees the evolution of new species. The endings also feature Statues of Liberty for the different species, or its ruins if every species is extinct. You maniacs! God damn you all to hell!
- Predator: From the player's point of view, the humans are advanced aliens, that land on your planet to hunt you.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey: The space station Charles Darvin is controlled by a unfriendly talking computer, that has several personality modules.
- There are species named Chuckberry and Isnobug.
- Succession Game: Of the build-in variant. Different players can control different species. This feature is removed in Magnetic Planet.
- Surprisingly Sudden Death: It is possible to get randomly killed by the an electric plug or by sinking in quicksand.
- Tech Points: In every round, you get evolution points depending on your population, and can add them to the 13 stats you have.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: You have to fill the first food bar in the survival round, otherwise units on the world map will die. The second bar improves your reproduction.
Extra Tropes for Magnetic Planet
- Animal Mecha: One of the predators is a robotic dog.
- Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: The male robots are Tin-Can Robots, while the females are boxes with materials, which are used to assemble the robot children.
- Extreme Omnivore: The food for robots consists of crystals, screws, electric plugs, light bulbs, resistors and insulation weed.
- Humanity's Wake: The backstory mentions, that humans are already extinct as they failed to adapt to new forms of energy.
- Magic Floppy Disk: The Power-Up Food from Q-Pop is replaced with a TDK floppy disk.
- Star Fish Robots: One of the predators is a robotic hydrant.
- Symbol Swearing: In the manuals the robots are shouting hexdecimal code at each other like "09 BD FC 01 02!"note . This doesn't translate to meaningful ASCII text, but just symbols and control characters.
- Tin-Can Robot: The competing species are these. Six races distinguished by color. You play the red one.
- Trap Door: This replaces the quicksand as source of Surprisingly Sudden Death
