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!

You've Unlocked Bonus Concept Art

Achievement unlocked: View extraneous art post for The Legal Arcade.

I expect this to be part of a series of court scene drawings, but this one is for Pac-Man. Click for an embarassingly huge resolution image.

PWNies 2008: Best Independent Game

Okay, it was World of Goo. I'm not going to mess around with the nominees, primarily because I feel guilty that I didn't get to play Braid, so I can't be sure if I would have preferred it to this game or not.

Anyway, World of Goo was a real triumph for independent games, as the experimental gameplay project published a really successful game out of a simple concept (and some good humor and art design). Despite an apparent 90% piracy rate (shame) the game appears to have made some coin. I wrote a review of it for BlogCritics here, so you can read that if you're interested in reading a boring positive review.

PWNies 2008: Best Game

Welcome to the most presigious awards show at The Legal Arcade, the PWNies. Tonight, we'll (the royal We) be deciding what was my favorite game that I played in 2008. Here are the nominees:

Grand Theft Auto 4

Metal Gear Solid 4

LittleBigPlanet

Fallout 3

Fable 2


...and, the winner is *opens envelope* Of course!

Grim Fandango! Certainly my favorite game of 2008. I had never played it before, and it was a marginally better experience than any of the other nominees. I loved MGS4 almost as much, but Grim Fandango edged it.

Alcopops Banned from Video Games by Illinois

Um, yeah. Not that there has ever been a game that happened to advertise "alcopops", but in Illinois, there never will be. There you have it.

via Kotaku, via GamePolitics

The Wii is Personified by its Own Download Screen

I just wanted to point out that everything you need to know about the Wii, you can find out from its downloading progress bar. Look at it here, at 2:20 in the video. Rather than a percent completed bar or something, it's Mario constantly running forward, collecting coins and eventually breaking the blocks above him with every 1/3 of the download that is complete. Here's why this is all you need to know about the Wii:

1. It looks slick and cool, though it doesn't actually give you the information you need.
2. It has Mario, who is in nearly every game worth owning on the Wii, excluding Zelda, of course.

The Wii is just really cool and fun, but isn't actually as powerful or helpful, exactly. But still, that Mario nostalgia draws me in heavily along with plenty of other people, so I like this download indicator better despite how mostly unhelpful it is for showing, you know, how much of the thing you have downloaded so far.

The Case of The You Testament

Now, this is a site about controversial games, and if this game were mass-market at all, this would be huge news. The You Testament is a game in which you play as a lost-to-history thirteenth disciple of Jesus, and you can be anything from white male to black female. Jesus also teaches you about meditation, and harnessing the power of chakra. The game also apparently ends with you hanging on a cross for hours, waiting to die (I haven't been able to play it this far). Thankfully, the only people who know about the game are basically open-minded and fair about it.

The game is the final work of the independent solo game developer Mat Dickie, who has been creating games entirely on his own of fairly large scope for years. A quick look at his other games after playing The You Testament will show you that this game uses bits and pieces of all of his other games, including some really interesting wrestling sims. This does give an odd feel to The You Testament that you don't find often, because it is 3D and nearly polished enough to appear to be a well produced game, but certain elements appear weak because you are actually playing the design of one man. The eyes don't really look right, you'll find almost immediately, and Jerusalem is oddly chaotic and weird, but that makes sense when again you consider that one guy had to program the AI, graphics, sound, story, and everything else.

Anyway, it's really a very interesting look at the Jesus story from the perspective of another man at the time, and I'm very glad that there aren't legislators out there citing this as destructive to our children or anything. I'm just very glad this sort of thing exists in gaming and sad to see such a productive game designer quit his post.