Category: video games

Chocolatier 2

Or: In which I make 630 million dollars.

Some time ago, I tried Chocolatier, a game about running your own chocolate factory. Overall, I thought the game play fell short of what it wanted to be, but I had fun anyway because of the chocolatey goodness of it all. (See also Sushi Go Round.)

A few days ago, JayIsGames announced the existence of Chocolatier 2, and I downloaded the demo, figuring that I probably wouldn’t purchase the full version this time around. But in fact, they’d fixed quite a few of the things I thought were underwhelming about the original, and the second episode is considerably better rounded as a game; by the time I finished the demo hour, I was hooked. Again.

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“Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!”

JayIsGames recently noted (alongside the existence of IFComp) that the Independent Games Festival entries had been listed. When I went to have a quick look at the entrant list, I noticed a new entry by Mousechief Games, whose “interactive fiction” The Witch’s Yarn I reviewed a while back for IF Review. (The scare quotes are there because, while Mousechief calls the game interactive fiction, it isn’t IF in the sense that this site usually uses — there’s no text parser.)

I thought Witch’s Yarn wasn’t especially challenging as a game and was disappointed in some aspects of it, but I did like the attractive, cartoonish graphics, the jazzy score, and the idea of its story-centric casual game style; so I was pretty curious to see what they’d done with their latest, “Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!”. It does not look as though there’s a full version of the game available for sale, but there are demos for both Windows and Mac.

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Ayiti: Cost of Life

Recently, on a recommendation on this blog, I tried Ayiti, a UNICEF-sponsored game about the difficulty of making ends meet as a poor family in Haiti.

It’s deeper and more playable than some of the other political games I’ve mentioned here recently: the interface is mostly well-designed (though I had a couple of particular gripes); there’s enough variation from playthrough to playthrough that you have to adapt your strategy a bit even when you think you’ve cracked the game; and it didn’t feel like preaching to the choir, at least not all the time.

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McDonalds Videogame

Continuing with the protest game theme (something that I’ve found increasingly interesting of late), recently I played a few rounds of the McDonalds videogame.

The premise is that you’re running McDonalds (no coy alternative parody names here — they frankly use the brand and icons throughout) and must make decisions about how to raise and feed cattle, run your employment lines, and set up advertising systems. Some of your options are pretty disturbing: there are a range of hormones and animal-byproduct-based feeds that you can use to bulk up the cows, for instance. You can bulldoze rainforest and steal land used to feed the local population in third-world countries. And if you overgraze pasture for too many years in a row, it will lose fertility and eventually become an unrecoverable wasteland. There are plenty of opportunities for villainy.

The press I’ve read on the game generally suggests that it is meant to make us all question McDonalds and similar corporations. Personally, I found myself feeling unexpectedly sympathetic for the corporation.

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