PixlBit

I used to, back in the 90s, be into getting classic board games to play on video game consoles. There was Risk and Monopoly on Genesis that both played very close to the originals. So I looked for others and one that landed in my collection was The Game of Life for Playstation. I had played the board game back in the 80s and thought it was pretty neat. Last night I played the video game version and was less impressed.

The Game of Life is a game where you take turns moving on a board full of different life events both good and bad. You spin a spinner to determine the number of spaces to move and then find out what happens. Sometimes you have choices like what occupation to take. You move through each decade by pasing through gates until retirement in the 2000s trying to build wealth along the way. The person with the most wealth at the end wins.

The Playstion version tries really hard to make things more interesting than the board game. There's a first person view from your car as it moves along the path on the board, there are pop up scenes that make really dull jokes concerning whatever you may land on, and there's a isometric view of you car on the board as you select from various menu options. It all looks nice but the board isn't a board. It's just a mass of twisted pathways and full of needless detail like trees. The environment is way too busy. The jokes inserted into game are really bad, just light unoffensive nonsense that's not funny at all and sometimes baffling. There's a genie that pops out in one instance and hands you a bunch of money with a lunatic smile. Maybe I'll have nightmares about that one. Finally the game goes a bit too slowly as you have to watch your car move along in first person after every turn.

The only thing I thought was interesting was the music which changes as you progress from decade to decade starting from the 50s through the 2000s. Each piece of music is a generic take on the time's style and sometimes sounding very close to a popular tune. I spotted the 80s one as being a variation on Thomas Dolby's She Blinded Me WIth Science. When the game gets to the 2000s, I couldn't figure out what the style was. The game came out before the 2000s, so I guess they came up with something that sounded futuristic. It seemed like a mashup of rap and electronica. I thought that was amusing.

Anyway, after one playthrough against a A.I. opponent who beat me by a couple thousand dollars, I stopped. Not all that interesting a game really, and neither was the original board game, although good maybe once. I wonder too at its message that the object of life is to amass the highest dollar amount. Should we all messure sucess by our net worth at retirement?