You're a Japanese record promoter, trying to recruit cute teen anime-style girls, train them artistically, and make them "idols" -- the Western cultural analog would be, of course, that you're hyping manufactured boy bands. Idolcraft is built using RPG Maker, though, so it's an interesting combination of a classic console-style RPG, an adventure game, and a resource management sim. You run around town, trying to make friends with cute girls and persuade them to sign with your studio, then training them, and trying to release as many successful CDs and DVDs featuring them as possible before the timer runs out.
Lucidity takes place in the world of dreams -- a world filled with Dreamers, real people who dream without awareness, and Lucids, those few who understand where they are, have a sense of self, and can learn to manipulate the dreamworld to their own advantage. The players, naturally, are Lucids.
Yet "a sense of self" only takes you so far; the Lucids have snatches of remembrance from their former life, and the process of character creation is, in fact, a matter of deciding how many memories you sacrifice for the sake of power and sanity -- and what things you do remember. You can bargain with the Dream King (that is, gamemaster) for some additional memories, by taking disadvantages in exchange.
Submitted by RobertAugustdeMeijer on Fri, 04/11/2008 - 17:35.
Insert pun on "progress" and "paradox".
State rhetoric question about loving numbers. Proclaim Progress Quest as the game for readers. Describe today's subject has perfect gameplay. Mention perfect controls. Mention zero loading times. Mention intuitive interface. Mention lack of bugs. Mention balanced classes. Mention ability to play on weaker computers. Mention addictive nature.
Almost 30 years ago, I was bored one evening and decided that what I really wanted was a D&D-like game I could play by myself. So I slapped together a little boardgame called DeathMaze that SPI published a year or two later. Since then, there have been probably hundreds of similar games published -- indeed, even from the inception of digital games, with titles like Wizardry. At present, my favorite game of the genre is FastCrawl, which is a nicely polished version; but "free" is a nice price to pay, and Monster's Den isn't bad either.
Sure, we all complain about the periodic gluts of movie licensed games that hit the market, but how often have you seen one based on a film by a director like Andrei Tarkovsky? This isn't exactly what you would call a mainstream inspiration or a quick cash-in opportunity. The film was made in 1979, and was in turn based on a short story by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
My Life With Master is as seminal a work in the history of tabletop role-playing games as Frankenstein was for literature. It's a game designed around not a narrative, but a dramatic scenario that you act out, producing your own unique narrative. From a game designer's perspective, it's something that must be studied, it's something that must be played.
A long time ago, a great war was fought between a few units composed of three to five individuals. Some of these individuals were dragons, liches, vampires, Dragoons, and level 23 Paladins. If the rebel soldiers fought enemies weaker than them, they became evil, EEEVIL, and people would balk at them efficiently liberating towns. Apparently even level 18 Seraphim will buckle under the horrors of warfare, turning into the pixel art equivilant of Coronel Kurtz. So the leader of the rebellion came up with a genuis political tactic; he'd avoid all combat and just ride a fucking griffin around after the real soldiers constrain the flow of enemies, who apparently all march in a straight line to your base. By the way, this game is a classic.
It is 1928, the kulaks are starving by the millions, and the collectivization of agriculture is proving to be a disaster. Careworn by his awesome responsibilities, our beloved leader, Comrade Stalin, wishes to have a pleasant evening with the other valiant leaders of the CCCP, and be told a folk tale similar to those he was told in his youth. Naturally, Comrade Stalin being who he is, at least one of the rest of us will be executed before the evening is out. And try to stay off the subject of agriculture.
Some years ago, at Fastaval in Århus, Denmark, I had one of the most splendid, if brief, roleplaying experiences in my life, in a mixed company of Danes, Swedes, and Finns, who partially in my honor and partially because English was the only language they had in common, chose to play with me in a language I found comprehensible. The game we played was The Upgrade; and it's a source of some little frustration that, reading over the materials they've used to present it to the world, my main emotion is a sense of dissatisfaction that the prose itself does not impart a clear notion of the pleasure to be gained by experiencing this remarkable ouevre. In part, perhaps, this is because it is translated from the Swedish (and for those who read it, a version in the original tongue is also available via the link above); but in part, it is also because some things that can be experienced in play are impossible to express in the more mundane form of the words used to describe their rules. Not always, to be sure; in reading, say, My Life With Master, you obtain a sense of the genius that likes within; but in the case of The Upgrade, surely, you do indeed need to play the game to understand what it has to offer.
The genesis of Violence was a conversation I had over lunch with James Wallis some years ago when he was in New York for a visit. He asked if I had any desire to go back to designing tabletop RPGs, and I said "not much"--but mentioned an idea I had for a wholly satirical and very likely unplayable game intended mainly as an attack on both the business practices and unspoken assumptions of RPGs. I believe my original title was "Bloodshed." We chortled a bit, Wallis went away, and a few years later wrote saying he was launching a line of short, brief, experimental RPGs by the likes of John Tynes and Robin Laws, and would I be interested in doing that repulsive game idea I had. Well, good company to be in, anyway, and I had some time between projects.
Karoshi means “death by overwork”. The game traps you in a labyrinth of office space with only one means of escape: killing yourself. It’s a satire of the mind-killing effects of constant work. Luckily, the game’s structure makes it perfect for briefly playing it in your cubicle while nobody is watching and sharing it with the colleagues you trust. Watch out, though, the laughter this game will create might attract some unwanted attention from your boss!
The game has twenty-five levels where you must figure out how you can end your life as a suit-wearing work-droid. This isn’t always as easy at it sounds. Most of the puzzles require smart use of boxes and triggers, but many levels require you to think out of the box. Humor is often your reward, as the scenarios are totally unexpected.
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