Life Sim

Simon Read's New Star Games specializes in sports games where you manage not a team but the career of an individual athlete; the New Star Soccer series demonstrates the virtue of this, providing a style of play quite different from either the high-res "you are there" gameplay of conventional sports games or the spreadsheet-like play of sports management games.

New Star Tennis is his latest outing; as the name implies, you're a tennis player on the international circuit. You plan activities week by week, including training, participating in a tournament, relaxing by playing minigames (darts, kart riding, going to the casino or betting on the horses), or shopping. Equipment can allow strength and stamina training, but also apparently to attract sponsors, you have to live some kind of extravagant lifestyle, so you need to buy crap for the sake of buying crap.

I think I want to be Paolo Pedercini when I grow up. Of course, he's younger than I am, so I guess that's not going to work.

He knocked off this game in a few days as an Experimental Gameplay Project entry. It is a more emotionally compelling -- chilling, rather -- experience than the much-touted Passage -- at least for me. Passage is an evocation of the tritest idea of romantic love. every day the same dream is an evocation of the alienation of modern suburban life.

Rohrer's Passage has always polarized gamers; either you appreciated its attempt to elevate the medium past primal urges or you thought it was pretentious fluff. Developer Lurk falls into the latter camp, and did the most indie thing you could do in response: make a parody game poking fun at it. While Rohrer's piece is heartfelt and earnest, Lurk's anti-Passage is absurd and nihilistic -- and elicits a chuckle or two as well. While he claims that games can never be art he inexplicably made a game that would qualify as such, albeit in a satirical Dadaist sort of way. If you've ever participated in one of those "iz gaimz aart" arguments in a forum (or here!) it'll whack your funny bone.

Cute Knight Kingdom is an elaboration of Hanako's older game, Cute Knight, with more places to go, more quests, and vastly improved graphics. This being an indie game, "vastly improved graphics" does not, in this case, mean high-poly 3D virtual worlds, but actual full-color illustrations and 8-bit sprites, instead of the black-and-white line drawings of the original.

Hanako is an American developer, but this is a dojin-style game, with anime-inspired art, mild interaction, and with story and romance at least as important as actual gameplay. As with the original, you are a girl of 18 who, in three years, must find her destiny and happiness -- but that can mean taking almost any path, from becoming a dressmaker to becoming a warrior. Yes, there's combat, of a sort, but you can avoid it entirely if you wish.

As I said reviewing the original game, "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."

And that is certainly true of this game as well.

At the start of the year I lost my grandmother. I loved her as much as my parents and lived with her for a period of two years. During this time I helped take care of her, and while playing Home I couldn't help but think of her. I felt a twang of emotion at the end of Passage, but this is the first time my eyes misted up from playing a game. The protagonist is an old man in a hospice; as player, you act the role of surrogate caregiver. You balance the old man's needs like you would in The Sims, and like Billy Suicide, something meaningful emerges as the game unfolds. That's all I will say for now, spoilers and observations after the break.

Real Lives 2010 is an updated version of a game that has been around for several years. For those familiar with the older edition, the main differences are considerably superior graphics (including algorithmically generated 3D faces for your characters) and aspects of the game that pull in information from web sources such as Google Maps at times.

Racing games are the most egregious example of what might be called the EA playbook: throw money at development and push the graphic bar higher and higher to crowd out less well capitalized competitors, while rarely, if ever, actually innovating on a gameplay basis. Video clips from racing games under development are a staple of demonstrations at industry shows, because they show off the most rarified and advanced techniques -- the reflective glint off a highly-polished hood, the physics of crumpling on impact, a level of detail and polish that produces a sense of marvel that we've gone from Pong to here in a single generation.

Other than, perhaps, the racing game, there's no game genre so set in stone, so lacking in innovation as the sports game, which survives (and from a market standpoint, thrives) simply by modest tech updates and new player stats on a yearly basis. And there are really only two kinds of sports games; ones that simulate matches in vibrant 3D, and ones that simulate team management in a spreadsheet dressed up with a few graphics.

Which is why Simon Read's New Star Soccer series, of which this is the fourth, is so brilliant; Simon Read is doing something nobody else does. New Star Soccer is a life sim in which you control the life and career of a footballer.

If you say "Cliffy," it might mean one thing to a mainstream gamer, but to someone interested in indie games, we're talking about Cliff Harris of Positech, a refugee from the conventional industry now releasing one excellent indie title after another -- Democracy, the original Kudos, and Rock Legends, and now this game.

On occasion, I've referred to five-minute games that have an emotional impact (like The Crossing) as the gaming equivalent of tone poems; these games from Ze Frank are more like quips or epigrams -- five second games with a bit of a sting. You kind of have to play all three to get the point.