5 Ways The Bailout Game Sucks

The Bailout Game is, to put it briefly, weak. It's a serious flash game about the current bank bailout process, and it tries to give you the reins on how to save and who not to. Gameplay consists of slowly (so slowly) advancing space by space, either saving or rejecting each bank in turn, followed by a humorous video or picture or something else that may or may not make any sense. Even as far as serious flash games go, this game fails on at least five levels:

1. Any rhetoric they may have attempted to splice in to the game is lost on me (and Ian Bogost, and others). Going through and simply bailing every bank out will leave you with about 500 billion in bailout money left and a place in the leaderboard. Mechanically bailing out every bank makes the economy actually grow. It would appear that the only way to get a better score is to skip spaces by double clicking the "Go!" button, apparently a glitch.

2. The game is very opaque in a way. If you actually try to reject certain banks, then random other banks will fail, and you're left none the wiser. Why should you even reject them anyway? On second thought, maybe the game just wants you to bail everyone out, even though its videos tend to ridicule you for it (old film reels telling you about "state capitalism").

3. The actual "game" part of the equation is shoddily designed. It's boring. Press a button to advance one space, wait for it to crank over to it, say bail or don't, see a gag/pull a lever like you're on a slot machine/play an easy timing game, wait for the camera to slowly pan over to the "recession" car then back to you, repeat. It's not efficient or interestingly designed. This would be fine if the above issues with the decision-making were interesting.

4. The comedy varies in quality. Some of the news scroll jokes on the bottom are okay, some of the old film reels are funny at first, but... If any of it had a point it would probably be better, rather than just "So Fred Thompson and John Edwards walk into a bar".

5. Otherwise, the game initially looks like a well-funded endeavor. Unfortunately, all the money was put into technical details rather than, I don't know, actual game design.

So go on! Play it, Woo!

Play the News Game.com

Ian Bogost recently pointed out www.playthenewsgame.com, an interesting predictions site he describes as basically like fantasy sports with the news. Ranging from Oscars picks to the Pennsylvania Primary, there are lots of little "games" that tell you everything about a current situation then allow you to share your opinion and make a prediction from several different sides of the story. I find that they tell the actual stories of the news very well and can summarize points of view nicely. The opinion and predictions after you've read what's going on serve community functions, like a point system for each player. After you've earned enough points from playing, commenting, and accurately predicting, you can move up their ranks from citizen to politician, and eventually up to president. Anyway, it's neat and useful, though not exactly a game like you might expect. It definitely matches people who want to read the news more than someone looking to play a game online, as you'll see when you've played through one. Anyway, I'm recommending the site, as you can go there to get a nice perspective on the potential Take Two takeover.