Alter Ego

The Good
You can tell that the game's author holds a Psychology PhD. Every situation in the game has a myriad of potential outcomes, and the factors which influence the outcome are highly subtle. For example, in your career you have the chance of meeting a potentially influential businessman for a drink - any past tendency to abuse alcohol makes a positive outcome less likely, but if your character's vocational strength, confidence and expressiveness are high enough, you might get away with it. When attempting to get attention at a service station, you need to be pushy but not too pushy - your record of calmness and expressiveness impact the likely result here.

With so many personality factors to decide before the game even starts, each game can be completely different. As the packaging suggests, you can be whoever you want to be. Decisions are easier as well, as there's nothing physiological or tangible riding on them. Why run the risk of your wife finding out about an affair if you won't feel anything during the affair?

The Bad
The game takes place in a sandbox world. As the game progresses there are no political or social changes, the whizz-bang car or computer you've bought doesn't depreciate in value, and this limits the range of careers on offer to 'normal' ones. Also, the game code assumes that your parents were together in your childhood, and that you are heterosexual (needless to say, the author of an online remake of the game gets many requests to add this feature).

Although some of the dialogue did make me chuckle, other sections are cringe-worthy and cloying.

The Bottom Line
An adventure game of sorts, Alter Ego puts you into a simulation of real life, and gives you all the key choices to make. You can choose a degree and a career path, anything from entrepreneur to scientist, save lives, take up interesting hobbies, and have the marriage of your dreams. It's an individual and unusual basis for a game, but it all hangs together due to the variety, humour and obvious validity of the outcomes.

The Good
First of all, I'm BACK! A bit of a hiatus from the net, so I'm here again... It's good to be home :)

Now onto the review...

I stumbled across Alter Ego a few months ago, and was intrigued. A life simulaton? C'mon. That's ridiculous. Actually, It's quite good.

First of all forget about fancy-schamcy graphics and sound. No motor skills needed other that to type you name and some letters and numbers, no LPB's stalking you at every turn. This isn't even a game. It's a psycholgical experiment.

The graphics are CGA.(so there is NO excuse for you not trying it if you find it :) and the sound is the PC speaker. That's it. But it does it's job.

You start off at birth, and even then you have the choice of giving your mom an easy labor or fighting it and putting your virtual mom through hell. But I digress. As you go through the game, you make choices... be it figuring out what your hand is to who you marry, and what type of job you choose. Each choice will affect you in different ways, such as you life expectancy, your intellegence, etc.

As you work your way through the stages of life, you get a idea of how it works. You can play as yourself, making the game a mirror image of you own life, or you and play a completely opposite person and do all the things you don't have the guts to do in real life.

So as you live out your life stages, you make decisions. But BE AWARE, you have the option to answer questions about your personal sexuality, so if you're uncomfortable with question of that nature, you can opt NOT to have the questions asked to you. Although in my opinion, It makes the game more "real"

The Bad
This game has no downside besides the graphics and sound. But then again, They suit the purpose. Although I think a WIndows version of this game would do very well.

The Bottom Line
Its a great game. Similar to a Purity Test, but not just on sex, it can be a fun game. Just don't take it too seriously. :)

The Good
This is a very novel approach for a game. Instead of letting you live a new life as a super-hero, or a dungeon-crawling dwarf, it lets you replay your life as a normal person. Alter Ego indeed! You can actually create a new you fairly accurately just by answering a bunch of questions. Once that is done, you can choose a life-stage to begin in. This lets you decide how long your game is. The younger you start (from birth even!), the longer the game. I played all the way through, and trust me, it takes at least 45 minutes to an hour.

As you get older, you have more choices to try. Like when you get to your teens, along with the usual life experiences, you can try relationships, High School experiences, risks, and even get yourself a job. And it only gets more complicated from there, like in real life.

The Bad
My only real problem with this game is that you can only use the space bar to enter you choices. I don't mind having to use two hands, but having to use the arrow keys, you'd think the Enter key might have been a consideration...

The Bottom Line
This is a very interesting approach to a game. It lets you do things you never did, and without consequences. In real life, anyway. It doesn't have a lot of replayability, but it is fun for a little while.

The Good
For one thing one could try to live their lives or they could try things one will never try in real life like get naughty. like in one part a game keep teasing you what you going to do? w\Well if you like to be naughty you can lift her skirt but you'll get smart-aleck comment " one day she might become your wife". I lost my copy when we had a flood when we were kids...shame.... I wish I could get a copy that might run on windows XP or vista. How about you guys making one with 3D graphics like what they did for Castle Wolfenstein and Doom.

The Bad
Well basically nothing , at that time computers were not like what we have now. Basically you attach them to TV or a monochrome or color monitors. and graphics were simple then,. Hey I'm not complaining, I THINK IT WAS ONE OF YOUR BEST. Thanks!

The Bottom Line
It is one hell of a game that if you did not have a chance to play it, it's like you lost 1 (or more) lifetime. Great going guys!

The Good
The premise is pretty amazing and I was seriously willing to sit through this game entirely. A little text-based game that gives you a character that you must lead through the many stages of life sounded pretty nice to me. I had always wanted such a game and found the "The Sims" franchise to be seriously lacking, this because "The Sims" was always very repetitive and lacked the depth of true life, instead it was mostly about daily routines.

The story is pretty well-written and allows you to make some very interesting choices regarding life. The idea is that you pick a random aspect (family, health, love etc.) and answer a question regarding that subject, depending on your choice you are awarded with a result and some points for your stats. There are also some special aspects you can always choose, such as; work, children and dating, these are all pretty nice, but do often lead to weird situations. Oh, I forget to say: Dating and marrying is pretty hard to pull-off in this game, the game is full of such details.

The game was interesting enough to keep me hooked for hours after hours, most games only keep me busy for less than an hour or less since I got a job. I can easily spend four to five hours in this game without ever getting bored, this is just perfect for when I got way too much time left. The developer really deserves a trophy for this, it's good enough to keep me hooked for hours, but it's also not addictive unlike World of Warcraft and other game that try to keep you hooked for long periods of time.

The Bad
My biggest complaint is that the game is the ones that decides when you move to the next phase of life, you can leave a phase early, but there is no way you can finish all the decisions before moving on, especially later on when you can do the side-quests (for lack of a better name for them). I understand that this is to increase replay value, but I just can't handle it when I know I am missing content. A better option would have been to have a few main choices that you need to complete and a lot smaller choices that change every time a new game starts (there are too many choices for just one game). This way you don't tease the players and still maintain your replay value.

The game lacked visuals and that was kind of a problem, I know this is an old game, but there is just no way to ignore it. You have a black background and white letters, there are no images or different colors, only black and white. This was acceptable in the 80's, but it hasn't aged very well. If I had played this game for a few hours, I would always boot-up "Wii Sports" just to amaze thick little brain.

The Bottom Line
This is a pretty nice game to play, but I hate the fact that I always know there is content that I will not be able to play. The feeling that I am leaving something unfinished in my previous phase of life is very annoying and I just can't enjoy it, every time I move to a new age I stop the game and abandon it for a week or two for that very reason.

It's still a very well-written story and with some interesting choices, but the flaws are gigantic and take a lot of fun away from the game.

The Good
This is the perfect life Simulator game better than the Sims,but in this game you control only one person instead an entire family. I've liked because it's really realistic and there's some really funny episode (some of the adolescence episodes are really funny like a beer drinking contest) and a unlimited combination to do a personality.

The Bad
Today i cant see a remake of this game due to his Sexual,criminal and drug related content, this Rating board system's (Like PEGI or ESRB) will put this game in bad light. And today all the people are interested in The Sims,i like The Sims but a life simulator for be "complete" should be seen even the negative aspects of life. (Like Depression,Drugs and criminality)

The Bottom Line
"A Life simulator never seen in the history of gaming"