Life Sim

Well, I wanted to review Ian Bogost's new game Fatworld today, as it was just launched, but as it happens it runs like molasses on my 1.5GHz machine, so this will have to be more of a "first impressions" post, perhaps with a more in-depth review to follow in future.

Passage is a special kind of game made by an unusual kind of game developer. Jason Rohrer lives with his wife and child in a cabin in upstate New York. This cabin is specially insulated to maintain heat during the winter; it has means of collecting rainwater and a fully implemented garden in the back yard. As a result, Jason and his family live on around $800 a month. He has an MS in Computer Science and experience doing network applications, but he doesn't play the Corporate America game. Instead, he's free, and he's free to make beautiful art games that, like his house, are technically and experientially tight to the point of self-sufficiency.

Passage is about the literal passage through a maze, but it is also about the passage of time. You begin as a young man; you have a wall fore-grounded directly to your north, and can move to the right or explore the maze to the south. Early on you encounter a woman; if you bump into her you will fall in love and become her companion. Together you walk through life, illustrated as a variation in wallpaper; you age together, you explore together.

"I wanna be a rock 'n' roll star." Surely there is hardly an American -- indeed, a citizen of the Free World -- who hasn't thought that, from time to time. And since games are what let us play out our fantasies, it's a wish that's obviously a strong one to build games on.

Yet the single mainstream title that succeeds in addressing this fantasy is a simple beat-matching game with a fancy UI device -- Guitar Hero. It's an excellent game in its own limited purview, to be sure--but its limitations illuminate the intellectual bankruptcy of mainstream games.

Cost Of Life is one of the best political web games released in 2006, right up there with The McGame and the comic genuis of Airport Security. Unlike most games with a political message, like September 12th, or 3rd World Farmer, CoL has a strategy that works buried in a heap of faulty (and revealingly so) tactical blunders. This is most telling in the balance of the game's stochastic elements, where health risks can be marginalized and hurricane disasters are actually quite rare, unlike 3rd World Farmer's frustratingly even spread that ensured you'd lose everything every few turns.

There have been a number of space station sim games over the years, but in the past most have been firmly of the tycoon game style--that is, primarily about building modules and expanding your station, with some notional flow of dollars increasing if you do it well. SpaceStationSim takes a somewhat different approach; it's more of a hybrid of a life sim (the granddaddy there being The Sims) and a tycoon game. You create an astronaut, and the gameplay involves both building out your station and satisfying the needs of your crew. Which includes, naturally, things like making sure they have enough to eat and time for potty breaks--and also enough to breathe. Life on the final frontier isn't always easy.

Okay, I'm going to start with the reasons why you might not like New Star Soccer to get 'em out of the way, so I can then say why this game is, in its own way, exceptionally cool.

1. I'm a Murrican! Fuckin soccer. Do I look gay to you? How bout them Gints?

2. Geez, the graphics look like I'm playing on a NES. If a sports game doesn't look better than the game on TV, is it really a sports game?

Okay. Are we over that? Then onward.

You'll find Virtual Villagers 2 on the casual game sites--but don't let that mislead you. This isn't the usual match-three game, but an extremely unusual--and remarkably compelling--game, in which you help an island of primitives survive and thrive. Unusually, the "world" continues when you're not playing--so, Tamagotchi-like, you need to check in every few days to see what's happening and adjust your strategy.

Virtual Villagers is an offbeat "life sim" game in which you control a village of castaways on what seems to be a South Pacific island, helping them to build something like an adequate life for themselves. What's unique about it in comparison to other life sims is that "time" progresses even when the game isn't running--in other words, if you don't come back to the game for several weeks, you may find that something fairly horrific has happened to your civilization.

Most games marketed as 'casual,' you come to the end of the 60 minutes you get for free, and they want you to pay bucks, and you say 'meh--time to go to bed.'

When you find one that makes you instead go 'damn!', you know you've found a winner.

The background? You're 20, you have no particular skills, you're working as a waitron to pay the bills. Sure, Horatio Alger would urge you to work hard to get ahead, but a person's gotta have some fun. If you're too depressed and lonely to get out of bed, how are you going to do that?

Looking for a multimillion dollar 3D big-budget extravaganza from a major publisher? Boy, have you come to the wrong place. A lot of the graphics in Cute Knight are scans of line sketches, and most of the rest are anime-inspired Illustrator drawings. The gameplay itself is pretty simple, too--you choose a place for your character to go and some actions for her to perform, and your stats are updated as a result.

And yet somehow you find yourself drawn into her story--and want to drive it to something like a happy ending. In other words, Cute Knight quickly creates a sense of emotional engagement that's lacking in far more expensively-developed and commercial titles.