Two links

Enthusiastic, spoilery review of Make It Good from someone who doesn’t generally seem to be a big fan of IF.

Cellcraft, an RTS-style game about cellular biology, from the creator of Super Energy Apocalypse. More thorough review to follow later, but the short version is: I think the tutorial is paced wrong, and the interface has a few dozen things that I would tweak. On the other hand, by the end I was thoroughly enjoying this despite the quirks, and recalling some things about golgi bodies and the endoplasmic reticulum that I haven’t thought about for quite a while. And the silly, cute story provides a bit of motivation for the whole thing.

4 thoughts on “Two links”

  1. is it just me, or does the difficulty of CellCraft ramp up way too hard? (I don’t know if the thing I’m on is the last level or not. ‘Indigestion’.)

    Having to go through the whole level after screwing up is just tedious, so I quite after my third failure.

    1. It is a bit uneven. I had a lot of trouble with the first level after the tutorial ends, but after that it felt relatively smooth to me. Possibly other people will experience it differently.

  2. This is completely aside from the gameplay, but it looks like the game might be intended to get players thinking about the origins of cellular structures in creationist rather than evolutionary terms:

    1. It’s really not, unless you believe everything the developers have said about this is a lie. I don’t really see the framing story as creationist — certainly there’s no mention of God in there, and I doubt most ID people would accept “cells were built by a race of alien intelligent platypus creatures” as a good explanation for where life came from.

      I totally get where the controversy comes from, and I agree it was perhaps unwise of the developers not to realize what it would mean to have a couple of advisors who are creationists on their support staff.

      But as far as I can tell this was huge naivete about the way science is discussed and taught in the US, rather than a secret plot, and there’s no clear evidence that the creationists involved in the project had anything at all to do with writing the framing story, or that the framing story was intended to make a creationist point.

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