| MrLipid's Closet of the
Odd
Welcome to the Closet. This is a place where opinions on PC-based oddities that resemble games can be found. Some of these oddities are multimedia experiments that wound up being marketed as games. Some are efforts to create online communities by using a common quest as the glue to hold the community together. Some are collections of game clichés offered as if such a collection constituted a game. Some of these oddities are pretty good, some are average and some are just plain awful. Fortunately, if only for the just plain awful, the Closet has no admission standards. As long as a PC-based experience can be confused with a game by an inattentive observer, it has a place in the Closet. The charter members of the Closet are Force Majeure II: The Zone, Maestro, and Tellurian. Force Majeure II: The Zone is pretty good, though one is advised to believe the developer when he says it is a serious-minded interactive story as well as an adventure game. (FM II: TZ refers to itself as an interactive story, leaving the serious-minded adventure game comments to its website.) Maestro, the online oddity, is the grandest effort so far by Tubular Bells composer Mike Oldfield to create an online community based on a treasure hunt in some bizarre environments. Tellurian is a collection of game clichés that provides the best example to date of what a computer game designed by Ed Plan 9 from Outer Space Wood might look like. Should you at any time while reading about any of these titles begin to fear for your sanity, just keep repeating: It's only something that resembles a game, it's only something that resembles a game, it's only ... Games in the Closet Force Majeure
II: The Zone |
