Life Sim

Cart Life bills itself as a "retail simulation," and a priori, you may expect it to be a conventional sim/tycoon style game in which you buy merchandise, set prices, and consider your profit your score -- a conventional, if somewhat dull kind of game. It is nothing like that at all.

Actually, it is an interactive narrative with a crafting minigame, brutal time pressure despite its essentially slow pace, and curiously emotionally compelling. In addition, it has richer and more artistic subtext that any bombastic, big-budget commercial release.

You play either as Melanie, a recently divorced woman starting a coffee cart business, whose chances of gaining custody of her daughter depend on her business success; or as Andrus, a somewhat lonely Ukrainian immigrant running a newsstand, who must make enough each week to make the rent on his SRO hotel room, or be rendered homeless. This ups the emotional ante, of course. A third character, Vinny, a bagel vendor, can be unlocked for a $5 payment to the developer.

Hero Generations is an indie social game that's an RPG of a sort. The graphics are SNES-ish, and you control a 'hero' who moves about the world, fighting monsters and having encounters to increase their "fame," which is your score. The world is an 8x8 grid, and each time you move one square you "age a year." The HUD reports how many years of life you have remaining, though each time you lose a battle you love 5 years of life (unless you have a shield).

The objective, really, is to maximize your fame in your limited lifespan; your high score is reported on a leaderboard at game load and compared to the high scores of your friends. I considerably outrank Frank Lantz, ahem.

Me Tycoon is charming, but a bit of a mess. It's a Flash game designed to "offer young people a way to find out more about resources and opportunities about future careers."

After generating an avatar, you are born and quickly move through childhood and adolescence to age 16 (school leaving age in the UK), at which point you have to choose whether to go to work immediately or go to uni for qualifications. You're told about floating balloons which you can click; some pop up a window telling about a career, complete with a video of someone who pursues it you can watch, while others offer you the opportunity to buy something (some useless and some other of marginal usefulness), and some just give you a game benefit for clicking.

My Pet Protector is a Princess Maker-style life sim, except that it's also basically a dungeon-crawler. Instead of making choices for a cute anime girl, you're making them for fantasy adventurer-type, and a lot of the gameplay centers on turn-based combat with monsters.

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.