Virtual Corporation

The Good
Not everyone shares this opinion, but I really like the actors and the feeling they create. At first, they bring back some good 90's feelings from their old-school hair styles and clothing. No, they do not look very 2028-ish, just a bit "hip" from wearing useless accessories and standing in front of an abstract wallpaper. Then, they were probably all told to act like dickheads just wanting to pick on your errors - I'm always excited to hear the next insult of them. If you decline to do a little task for them, they go all "Oh, I will find another one who wants a promotion then." or "Do you even work at all here?". If you do not speak clear enough for them, you are told to brush your teeth or stop wasting their time. If you do a little error which gets you fired, two superiors instantly call you, telling you how they can't believe how dumb you are, always in this ass-friendly tune which makes you want to punch them into their grinning face. On the nicer side of those people you have to deal with, some sequences include entertaining jokes like a drunk superior wanting to go out with you, or the boss calling you when you're stressed out too much to inform you about two people in white coats going to visit you and bring you to an exclusive resort soon ("Oh, and have a nice day! ;-]"). There's also a virtual government, aka the "Government Node", mostly just wanting your money to stay on the NET; and they always refer to themselves as "Your FRIENDLY government" - yeah, friendly is in caps all the time, just in case you forget they're friendly and not annoying.

The lore is stupidly exaggerated, but always keeps me entertained. It's just so 90's. It's said that in 2028, every human on earth has something like a brain-implanted chip to connect to the "NET" to work there virtually. But in fact, the NET is just a huge step back compared to the real working world. In fact, if you stress too much in the game, it "fries" your brain as a side-effect, and then there's a happy News lady in the end, telling how someone died from work (once again), and, with a smile, suggests others to get their resumes ready.

The Game Over scene has some nostalgic value to me too. This 3D pre-rendered "Get Thrown Out Of The Window" scene is the most memorable thing of the game - probably because you see it like 20 times until you get further a little bit in the game.

Additionally, the German dubbed version has a lot of good old 90's voice actors known from TV, and I always love to hear them.

The Bad
The box art and advertisement for this game is highly exaggerated - even for the time back then. If you know the game, they look like a concept idea TopWare couldn't realize.

In the end, it's not more than some recorded videos of actors asking you questions to which you can respond in a multiple choice manner. You have the choice to speak in one of up to 5 answers or select them on-screen. But if you try to say anything else, you'd just get an annoyed "Speak English!" reply from the recorded actor. This also happens if you speak naturally. You have to speak slowly, clearly, with no background noises, say only the pre-defined words or the actors misunderstand you. But what would one expect from a simple speech-recognition software which is fed with a much too small dictionary of words it has to recognize? When you get to higher levels, you get less recorded videos... you get plain-text emails instead. Which you have to answer with pre-defined choices again. So if you thought a game becomes more exciting at higher levels, you experience the total opposite here.

If you do an error at work - which is, picking the wrong multiple choice answer - you get fired, and lose. Basically, you have to try-and-error at mostly every choice. Then you have to replay the game to that point and choose another option. Otherwise, you can't find your way through it. Oh, and while work is annoying enough, some viruses try to steal money from you all the time and pump up your stress level. Those viruses are a lame clone of Pong and some riddle clown asking you one of 50 very abstract questions (in fact, the answers to those are probably the most interesting part of the game).

The game tracks stress, energy and money over time. If you run out of energy, you lose. If you run out of money, you lose. If you get too stressed, you lose. You have to constantly watch your stats, or you can start over from your last save - if you have one, as you can only save the game at pre-defined points. Too bad the game doesn't tell you that you can see the current stats with F2; you really have to study the manual to find that. To keep up your energy, you have to abort your workday, go to a power plant over and over and waste money on buying more energy, like every 10 minutes, then go back to your virtual workplace of boredom. To keep your stress low, you need to buy a holiday trip - and only four of the two provided trips really help you with that, which you can't know at all at first. In fact, two trips are a video game facade and tell you to press arrow keys to keep control of your character - actually, the game just randomly selects an outcome every time (which is, you guessed it, another pre-rendered video) - and picks a death scene for you 90% of the time. The only two trips which would help lowering the stress are horribly expensive and consist of a 2-3 minute long video you cannot skip. As your stress goes up very often, you need to watch these trips like 5 or more times to win the game - a nice way to waste time. There are a few "games-in-the-game", like a miserable tank clone, some air hockey (just another Pong variation basically), and a "clumsy-3D" bike-shooting-pillar-whatever-game. While the last mentioned game is probably the best out of them, they all have such horrible graphics and control you just want to stop looking at it.

So, if your real work place is not annoying enough, play this game to feel real pressure - which you get from not wanting to quit the game.

The Bottom Line
Virtual Corporation tries to simulate a virtual reality network in which people would work in the year 2028, but fails miserably at it. You basically play the game out of the view of someone under a virtual reality glasses. But since it's just simulating a work place, it doesn't get much more interesting than a boring real world office job. Since your tasks are just to answer multiple choice questions, you get a Game Over for picking one or two wrong answers. You need some patience to find the right answers, because you have to play the game over and over as you cannot save all the time.