You would've loved black and white 2 then. The basic concept of the game was you are a god and you can choose to be evil or benevolent. Like if roller-coaster tycoon and Age of empire had a baby. The pointer was a hand that moved depending on what you were doing in your world. AND it changed the more evil or good you were.
There was a game reminiscent of Dungeon Keeper, except you were a Sauron-like figure that went around commanding the minions to kill the heroes and raze towns to the ground. It was on Xbox and I wish I remember what it was called. It was freaking great. It was like Dungeon Keeper meets Pikmin.
Proper remake was the keyword sadly. Overlords never really caught my attention or looked anything the same sadly. Granted with the IP in EAs clutches it won't ever happen but yeah :(
I've no idea. I know there was a spiritual remake of DK but I didn't care for the art style or just what it was doing in general :( I do remember it being quite popular though?
This is going a long way back but I'm pretty sure you could use it to just slap the shit out of your giant monster guy.
That might be a different "play as god" game though...
You're thinking of the right game. You had a pet that was pretty much a massive bipedal animal monster that you could train. Depending on what you do with them, when you reward them with food and petting and when you punish them by slapping them, they'd change their behaviour. You could teach them to either farm food off of fields or eat villagers when they were hungry, whatever you wanted. It was a really fun feature, at least for six year old me.