This game occupied me for much longer than it should have, especially at such a late point in the semester. Generally, these life simulations, anything from Kudos, to The Sims to a 15 minute demo of New York Nights, always seem to have this effect on me.
I guess I’m just fascinated by the idea of modelling life on a bunch of numbers, even though it’s way more fine-grained than that. Still, Alter Ego’s intrinsic traits seem to work really well (though whether you could max out intellect in your teenage years is to question). That it’s still relevant 30 years later is an obvious indicator of its accuracy.
I really do look at talented people in terms of Gladwell’s hours of deliberate practice and relationships in terms of Covey’s trust bank, but I dunno… is it really right to base things like love and friendships in any sort of numerical form?
But that’s me being evasive and thinking about game systems, avoiding writing about my actual life. And the overall feeling about life that I get from Alter Ego is regret…
My next post will be better.
It’s been a full month since I last played. I can easily find an hour of time every day to fit some games in… a lot of my days end with me wishing I’d played Starcraft instead of pool or whatever (there’s no part of his brain that wished he’d been working, though).
There’s no point in doing individual game summaries, especially with the volume that I intend to play. Essentially, games are won depending on who made more workers, and usually it’s not me.
I won my first game with a FFE opening. The opponent was obviously following some build order, since he never made Ghosts after his initial push. I barely held it (because of a late Probe pull) and the rest of the game was spent messing around with Warp Prisms and expansion denial. It’s good to know how easy it is to defend a FFE on Shakuras Plateau.
I don’t really want my play to be map dependent, but I’ll let this one slide. At the moment, I’m leaning a lot towards early Stalker pressure (pictured), but after that I don’t know… I used to like the options from a fast Twilight Council, but Immortals (and Warp Prisms) are really, really effective now.
My next post will be better.
