Kitsch

This is one of the best games I've played since maybe Minecraft. I was like, way into it. Oh wait, for a minute I thought I was writing for Game Informer.

This game put me in the mindset of Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the JFK and Johnson administrations. We burned to death 100,000 civilians in a night, men, women and children, but at least they aren't 100,000 zombies! There's also kitschy 60s music in the soundtrack, it really goes for a 60s aesthetic, which is a nice compliment to the kitschy 50s aesthetic that the Fallout series pioneered. After all, there is no nuclear war in this scenario, only Llama bombs, Zombies, and panicked civillians.

Most RPGs are all about the characters: who they fight, how they advance, what they can do. Primetime Adventures in the antithesis of this: the characters only matter in their place in the story.

Matt Wilson's game can be a challenge for gamers who cut their teeth on classic roleplaying games. A character's strength depends on only two things: how much the story is focused on that character and how much the player has contributed to the story. Everything else is just description. Characters are based around an issue, which guides sessions where that character is the focus, but has no mechanical effect on the game. The system is clean and simple, but its effect is to bring out a story from those playing it.