Alter Ego

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.