Finally, a Mostly Okay Bailout Game

Since I've been talking so much about how absurdly awful the online bailout-themed webgame scene has been, I guess I'll provide a slightly less rant-y post here for Budget Hero's updated, sort of bailout-themed game.

Budget Hero's update includes one new "badge" to the game, allowing you to set one of your three requisite goals to be "economic stimulus". In the game, you are allowed to add to and cut from any part of the budget that the game provides for, a fairly sizable choice range. On just dealing with the Bush tax cuts alone, you have about ten different choices, ranging from keeping them to reversing them to reversing them and taxing the rich a little extra. Your goal is to achieve the best possible combination of a balanced budget (one that will collapse later than 2030 or so) and your three chosen goals (like "green", "social safety net", and "national security"). Every budget change you make that helps one of your goals contributes a sizeable amount to coloring in the badge, a fully colored one indicating that you were successful.

This is at least a thoughtful game. You are given many, many choices on what to do with the budget, and you can read a lengthy piece of text for each choice, indicating the situation, pros, and cons to implementing that change. There's a lot of information here, and you really feel the pressure dynamic between cutting your spending to keep the debt manageable and implementing the programs we need, especially with the stimulus.

I have a few problems, though. Your three chosen goals allow you to basically ignore everything else. I chose "economic stimulus", "green revolution", and "energy independence". That means that the game doesn't really penalize me at all if I, say, cut defense spending by 10% (which the majority of players have done, likely out of necessity to come near a balanced budget) or even something uncharacteristic for a liberal like eliminating Medicare, Foreign Aid, etc. Your three goals should matter the most, but the others should still matter. The party wouldn't support a move to privatize defense or something radical like that, even if it's not part of your specific platform to keep national security a priority. But, changing the game so that every possible goal matters would make things even more tense and realistic, and it is just a game.

The game also allows us to assume that we stay in absolute power for about twenty years to actually see all of our economic programs take effect. It takes a while, sometimes. Well, I've written enough already. Play it, it's somewhat educational and at least partially successful at representing the tension inherent in the job.

Trillion Dollar Bailout: Another Awful Game

If you weren't already sickened enough by the freaking terrible Bailout Game, enjoy yet another inane bailout-based webgame with Trillion Dollar Bailout! This one makes all the same mistakes The Bailout Game made, but with less humor and an even worse presentation. As in the other one, there is no limit on the amount of money you can use, and the bailout money is always good. Okay, then why is there any debate? Just spend all the money in the world, forever, and the economy will be perfect! Yay!

I did several playthroughs (the "play again" button at the end doesn't work, though) and here were the results:

1. I gave bailout money to two homeowners then had to leave the computer to do something else. I came back a minute later to find I had won the game. Unbelievable. It's obviously a weak game if you have to do basically nothing to save the economy. God.

2. I then made a semi-serious playthrough in which I bailed out every homeowner who wasn't labeled "Happy Homeowner," but rather "Homeowner - Foreclosure" or something like that. I won, perfect score.

3. Then I went back through and bailed out every business guy at the top of the screen, instead. I saved the economy. There was apparently no difference, though it seemed like the recovery was a bit slower when I gave it to them. Still, just give out the money, and you win.

4. Now, and this is the good part, I just let the computer sit. I never gave any money to anyone, nor did I slap anyone, which rejects them. I came back thirty seconds later, and I had won. Oh my God, this is stupid.

5. Now I slapped everybody. That made the economy go down. What's the difference between slapping them and not giving them any money? It's the same thing! This appears to be the only way to lose the game.

So, in summation, there is no point to doing anything. You win if you stay totally idle. You can give money, (as much as you want with no repercussions), and you'll win. It's only if you slap people, which doesn't mean anything besides "I'm deciding not to give them money," that you can lose. There shouldn't be any difference between slapping and just missing someone. This fails as a game and as rhetoric, because it isn't fun or challenging in any way, and it fails to reflect anything about bailouts. Don't dare click over to the game, it just helps someone who doesn't deserve the attention for the extremely minimal effort they put into this game.

Sonic Retrospective, With Juicy Details

Just watch this video. I don't care if you don't see the others, but this video describes Sonic's conception as a character as a mixture between Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, and Santa Claus. Also, his name was "Mr. Needle-Mouse." Awesome.

Critiquing Classics Through GameTap: Gravitar

Today's "Monday Leaderboard" challenge on GameTap is the Arcade version of 1982's Gravitar. Gravitar is a sort of shmup, in space, with Asteroids-style movement and shooting in the area just (and sometimes inside) planets. You start off in the map section of the game above, where you just have to fly to the planet you want for specific levels. The numbers correspond to the difficulty and bonus points possible from those levels. All of those levels except for "9000" have two or more ground turrets protecting the fuel in the ground (blue squares) that you have to destroy, while watching out for Space Invaders-y looking enemies that just kamikaze into you. The "9000" level requires that you navigate a difficult course to shoot a reactor then fly back out. Which is impossible, with these Asteroids controls.


So, the controls are sort of their own thing. Yeah, I may not like them, but with a better control system this might be a much easier game, as most of your learning curve is just focused on trying to get your ship to float just long enough above a turret so that you can shoot it without it shooting you or you falling into the ground. But, you have to be pointing in the direction you want to thrust, and pointing your ship around isn't extremely easy or quick, so it is very difficult to get into a quick hover, turn around, shoot four or five bullets (more on that later), then turn around and boost away from the ground in time. This process is also always being interrupted by the flying enemies, which you can't actually devote any time to destroying. If you shoot them, they come back faster than if you had just let them miss you and go around the planet surface, which is stupid.

Shooting is very erratic, like in a lot of old Atari arcade titles. You just keep pressing the button to shoot, most likely, and you'll shoot only four at a time, which is a real problem when you have to destroy both flying enemies, which are converging on you, or you have to shoot that turret quickly so you can turn back around and boost away. Having four bullets at a time wouldn't be so bad if there weren't already so much difficulty in just navigating to enemies.

There's just no point in going through the easy levels, score-wise. You'll get most of 2000 points for beating the easy "2000" level with only two turrets, but that's not a lot considering that the actually rather easy "6000" level gave me 12000 once I got past it. On the "6000" level, you must navigate a cave-like area, but half of your enemies are above you, not below you, which makes things infinitely easier. Plus, the flying enemies can't get to you down there. So, my biggest tip for the unskilled who want to win something at today's GameTap tournament, play that level first. If you beat it, you'll immediately have a better score than the vast majority of players.


I've been pretty pleased with the GameTap users' rating so far, as they actually use all ten numbers, and tend to aggregate to have good taste (though they hate some of my flight simulators and really old strategy games, it would seem). The GameTap users' rating of the game is a 6.2 currently. I gave the game a 7, because it is plenty fun once you have gotten some idea of how to control your craft and still shoot things. Yeah, difficult, but that's how it was in the 80's, when businesses weren't afraid to publish hard games. I'm sure I'll find plenty more of them in my next Critiquing Classics pieces.

GameTap is Freaking Awesome

GameTap, the game service that was until recently owned by TBS, is my new favorite thing. I played around with the free games on it several times in the past, but just now finally paid for the year subscription. I did it mostly to play the Sam & Max games while I was obsessed with adventure games, but I've found so much stuff that I can't believe it.

Every day, I find something else I'm just thrilled by. First of all, reliving the nostalgia games like Robotron, Centipede, and even Crystal Castles brought me was great. Then today I found that they had the first RTS, The Ancient Art of War, a game I wanted to play so badly that I bought the disks for it several years ago though I had no way of actually using them. There are plenty of only slightly old games that slipped through the cracks of my gaming expenditures, like Imperial Glory and a few of the old Prince of Persia games, so this is a really exciting thing for me.

There are negatives: You have to be connected to the internet, the games every now and then disappear, leaving you helpless, and, well, the cost isn't really an issue at $60 a year. With more than a thousand games for me to play around with and some pretty fun competitions online (I have to get that Sam & Max poster signed by Steve Purcell) this is a really great service.

I believe I may start doing some silly, "AVGN but just text" reviews of the old games found on GameTap as well, because I'm constantly thinking about that sort of thing while playing. Watch for that in the future.

I Don't Feel Comfortable Talking about "RapeLay"

You'll notice that there's no picture at the top of this article, and I'm not going to talk about this game for long, but rather provide links for anyone who actually wants to know about it. But, as a blog about controversial games, this has to be the worst I've heard of yet.

If you remember Sexy Beach 2, from the old X-Play episodes or wherever, this is from the same developers, and it's called RapeLay. It is a Japanese hentai, rape simulator game. Not even just a game that involves rape, oh no. It is a rape simulator. Your character goes through the implausible motions of publicly raping three different Japanese girls, with lots of nasty details that you can read at Something Awful instead of here.

Anyway, the reason this is in the news right now, is because Amazon.com was in trouble for selling it (through a private seller named hentaiguy). They recently kicked the game and hentaiguy off the website, unsurprisingly. If that game got into the United States in any real numbers, that would allow congressmen to be talking about something that isn't Custer's Revenge (1982) when they say "murder, violence, and even rape" are in today's video games.

Jack Thompson Returns in Utah

Jack Thompson had a while to think things through after being disbarred, and has come back with his most nefarious (or at least possible to accomplish) scheme yet. He's proposing a bill for the Utah legislature, the most likely to pass one of his bills into law whether or not it's constitutional, and the bill will focus on false advertising claims rather than right-out bans.

What he means by this is that retailers advertise or claim that they do not sell M-rated games to minors. As soon as they have proof that minors got the game from their store, they can be attacked on false advertising grounds.

The problem with that is, assuming it passes and then succeeds under judicial review should it come to that, retailers don't have to even say they won't sell the games to minors. If your choice, as a Target, Wal-Mart, or Gamestop, is to either:

1. Say you won't sell games to minors for a theoretical "family-friendly" boost in marketing, and actually make absolutely certain that no minors get their hands on an M-rated game,
2. or just dump the whole "protecting minors from filth" thing so you have no chance of legal trouble,

I think I'd go with option 2 there. It's a bit like the "Happy Holidays" versus "Merry Christmas" deal. The retailers wanted to not mention Christmas to ensure that they didn't go to court with Johnny Suefurmunny, even though saying Christmas was more likely to appeal to the vast majority of regular consumers. Option #2 is safer for business, so even if this bill is successful, it may just make it easier for Utah kids to buy M-rated games.