Prison Architect Alpha 13 FULLY CRACKED

I've been designing some prisons recently. Well, I can scratch another item of my list of sentences I never expected to utter. I've been running them, too. Actually, facilitating the running of them, more often than not. I suspect that actual prison architects have a lot less hands-on time with functioning penitentiaries, but I don't know any to ask. 

I'm not sure why, but I thought it might be a good laugh, this whole Prison Architect lark. It's probably rather telling about my lack of experience with the prison system that I actually expected whimsy. I feel a bit foolish now. Like someone drinking toilet wine.

I started my first day of work with the best of intentions. I'm going to make the best darned prison in all the land, I thought to myself. I was looking forward to getting stuck in. Contrary to my real-life proclivities, I'm rather fond of management, and, indeed, micro-management in these here videogames. It is, as they say, my bag.

I had buckets of cash, a huge plot of land, and eight inmates arriving in a day. Luckily, construction workers are rather diligent in Prison Architect, so that left me with more than enough time to create the bare essentials. 

In a letter from some Prison CEO chap -- he had a mustache and thus appeared legit -- I was advised to construct a large communal holding cell instead of individual cells. The goal was to save money and time as I was just starting up. Sound advice, I thought, and I took it to heart. I was quite literally whistling as I worked, and things were coming together rather nicely.

                          

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Dragons Lair Remastered

If you're going to remaster Bambi and Dumbo, why not Dirk the Daring? The animated hero of 1983's arcade smash Dragon's Lair was created by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth, and over the years, he's gotten a bit fuzzy. (Dirk has, anyway; we can't speak for Don.) So, it's back to the vaults for a year of restoration from the original Technicolor negative, and the result is the extremely pretty, mega-nostalgic Dragon's Lair HD.

Dragon's Lair was the first arcade game that let you play a cartoon; its hand-drawn scenes played off a laserdisc hidden within the cabinet. Leading Dirk the Daring on his quest to save Princess Daphne from the enormous dragon was a matter of trial and error. If your joystick moves and sword strikes matched the predetermined pattern, you'd survive and see the entire 20-minute adventure play out in 15-second chunks. More often, you'd be out 50 cents in roughly as many seconds.

Showing ever bit of its 1983 heritage, the "make the right choice or you're dead" gameplay is still frustratingly hard. Many times you'll enter a room with no clue what to do and die almost instantly as a monster attacks without warning or a pathway crumbles beneath your feet. It's simply not fun unless you know exactly what to do as soon as you find yourself in each specific scene. If the original arcade timing is too tough, there's an Easy mode, but you're still likely to wonder what you were supposed to do to defeat the Lizard King or exactly which way to leap when the stone floor disintegrated.

                                

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Dragons Lair II Time Warp Remastered

This is the first truly arcade perfect version of the classic Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp. Remastered with stunning MPEG1 video quality, the beautiful Don Bluth animation can be played full screen or within an authentic arcade cabinet window. Princess Daphne has been spirited away to a wrinkle in time by the Evil Wizard Mordroc who plans to force her into marriage. Only you, Dirk the Daring, can save her. Transported by a bumbling old time machine, you begin the rescue mission. But you must hurry, for once the Casket of Doom has opened, Mordroc will place the Death Ring upon Daphne's finger in marriage and she will be lost forever in the Time Warp! Only you can save Princess Daphne... 

Original arcade look and feel in every move: Completely remastered for CD-Rom Relive the arcade experience with spectacular full screen, full motion MPEG 1 Video Multiple levels of difficulty Total scene authentication "Watch" feature to view without playing Feature-film animation by Don Bluth, director of "Anastasia", "The Land Before Time" and "American Tail" System Requirements for Windows Windows XP/2000/Me/98/95 Pentium II 266 MHz 32 MB RAM or more 4X CD-ROM drive DirectX 8.0 compatible, SVGA video card capable of 16-bit color display DirectX 8.0 compatible 16-bit sound card Keyboard/Mouse

                              

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Space Ace Remastered

Yet while several other games were produced and released in a similar fashion, ultimately, Laserdisc was not to be the format of choice for advanced gaming, leaving 'Space Ace' (like 'Dragons Lair' before it) a technological oddity -- not really a video game as traditionally defined, and not really a movie, either. Without falling squarely in one or the other camp, one might assume that the game would have just faded away, but instead it has enjoyed a curiously strong afterlife in recent years, both as a traditional PC-based game and (more successfully) as a light-on-the-interactivity standard-def DVD game.

Following the success of 'Dragon's Lair' in 1982, Don Bluth Studios quickly went to work creating a follow-up that would again rock the arcade world. What emerged two years later was 'Space Ace,' not so much a sequel to 'Lair' but its cosmic cousin. It transposed the same basic story and gameplay to a futuristic setting, with players once again navigating an intrepid hero, Space Ace, through various scenarios while trying to rescue the beautiful damsel-in-distress Kimberly from the clutches of the dastardly Commander Borf. 'Space Ace' also utilized the identical technology of 'Lair,' with its unique hybrid of traditional hand-drawn animation, simple player joystick commands and a LaserDisc engine driving the the whole shebang, turning 'Space Ace' a truly one-of-a-kind creation.

                                    

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THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII STEAM EDITION

Zoomy pictures, music that sounds like bees trying to emulate Brian May, and punches that seem to be part of the CERN program. It can only mean it’s a Japanese fighting game, and it’s coming to the PC. Confession: I have no idea what I’m looking at, but if you’re excited to learn that THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII will be on Steam next month then I’m happy for you. It’s not the most populated of genres, particularly on the PC, so this probably calls for some sort of celebration. This is apparently the thirteenth in the series, which means you’d have to use your toes if you wanted to count up all the games. Trailer and info below.

SNK puncheriser will have 36 fighters, 3-on-3 team battlers, and most importantly for the PC there’s an online mode which claims to have “vastly improved netcode”. The one thing I do know about fighting games is that latency is the final boss, so here’s hoping that the new netcode can make the game playable. Here’s the trailer that leaked last week. We didn’t report on that.


                           

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Formula Truck Simulator 2013

Despite coming with plenty of fresh content and features and being a completely separate title, the new version is free for everyone who bought the initial Formula Truck title!As the name suggests, Formula Truck 2013 simulates the 2013 season with the new trucks, some of which have been extensively modified relative to their 2012 counterparts.2013 also adds two new extra-calendar tracks – Campo Grande and Santa Cruz do Sul. More is to come.Every front has received some level of attention to smooth any remaining rough edges from the original Formula Truck.Physics have been adjusted to latest 2013 specs and data, with wear&tear of engines, tires and brakes also fine-tuned for more realistic behavior.

AI has also been adjusted so the AI trucks behave better and more consistently, adopting more reasonable strategies – no more pitstops in full distance races with normal tire and fuel multipliers.A lot of work has been done to enhance road surface and terrain details, in general and specifically to each track – bumps, grip levels, grass, curbs – everywhere you can put a wheel in has a greater depth of detail – and depending where and how you put it, the smoke / dust clouds can be massive!

Another new feature is a (non-dynamic) racing line – step offline, and feel the loss of grip through the FFB as you kick up a cloud of offline dirt – careful not to outbrake yourself there!

                                  

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Divekick With Crack

I rushed hurriedly to the booth and hopped on a system with a two button arcade box, one of the most unnecessarily overengineered and beautiful pieces I had ever seen. Lovely art with two huge blue and yellow buttons in the middle proudly labeled Dive and Kick. Two matches later and I was hooked. I interviewed the creator, I bought a shirt, I kept up on the news, I raved about it whenever possible, and I waited with anxiousness. It came out yesterday and I was so excited, I wrote a haiku about it.

If all of the waxing poetic about the game wasn’t an indicator, I like it. Superficially, Divekick is a joke. Obviously. One of the characters is a doctor named Dr. Shoals who has rocket boots and its looking for a cure for a foot disease called Foot Dive. Of course it’s a joke.

But if you give it a chance (i.e. exactly one match), you quickly realize it’s so much more than that. It’s a fighting game that attempts, and succeeds in many ways, to equalize all competitors. Gone are people who juggle your character across the map for 30 seconds and leave you with 2 hits until death. No longer can you put your controller down while waiting for someone’s massive combo to end. And obliterated is the feeling that no matter what you do, there are some people that know way more about the game than you and will exploit programming flaws to eviscerate you. By limiting your input to jumping, kicking, and having a few variations on moves for other characters, it’s as close to one on one, equal combat as you can get. You always know exactly what you did wrong and the other player did right to get you.

                                        

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Sir, You Are Being Hunted

I’ll have to be quick. I took a wrong turn on the way to the office and now I’m lost in the woodlands, being tracked by posh, yet murderous robots. Coincidentally, it’s a situation reminiscent of Sir, You Are Being Hunted: the open world stealth-’em-up from Big Robot, which is now available to buy in alpha form. Here, let me hastily embed a trailer, before metallic dogs track my scent, or, even worse, this flask of tea goes cold.

Sir, You Are Being Hunted continues to impress and tantalize with its classy Tweed-coated killer robots. A new video by developer Jim Rossignol shows off the new fens biome (a wetland, essentially), announces a date for the alpha release, and teases some new content.

The forthcoming open-world game Sir, You Are Being Hunted is edging ever closer to completion. The game’s procedurally generated British landscape is getting a few new biomes in the closing months of development, and the first of which, the mountain biome, is revealed in a new trailer.It’s Sunday, it’s (sorta) sunny – it’s the perfect time for a picnic on the procedurally generated moors of Sir, You Are Being Hunted.

                                   

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Take on Mars

Take On Mars is a story mode simulator with what appears to be a fully working replica of the supremely expensive rover that is currently up there doing it's thing on the red planet's surface. Equipped with 6 cameras of various focal points and positions, a boom arm with scientific equipment, and 4 wheels of independently pivoting dust compactors, you start the game situated in a mission control room with all the bells and whistles of your very own Rocket City. 

From there you can either follow the tutorial's craftily presented by an Android magician or just get straight into researching drop zone's (the imagery for these comes at hefty cost in the game's economy it seem's) for your rover's wanderings once it lands on the surface. 

Since it's still in beta early access, there do seem to be several gaps in the content and storyline. However it's still a work in progress and nonetheless an interesting and fun way to play away a couple of hours imagining that you're Capcom of this kinda epic triumph of robotic martian terrestrial exploration engineering. 

As far as the game's software engineering goes, it seems to use a nicely polished lite version of the Arma III engine. High resolution textures push the envelope of the visuals almost into uncanny valley territory.



                               

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StarForge

Last week we reported on how Steam Early Access, giving customers the opportunity to buy into the development versions of games like Prison Architect and Arma 3, as well as granting them the full game upon release. You can read plenty elsewhere about the completed games that are available on Steam, but very little has been written about what you get if you pay up for early access. We’d like to change that and we’re going to take a close look at some of the more popular early access games over the next few weeks. This is a little bit of an experiment for us and we’re not entirely sure if it’s going to work, so we’d appreciate your feedback in the comments.

StarForge, currently in Steam’s best-seller’s list, is a good place to start. It’s a scifi game of sandbox construction across procedurally-generated worlds and its ambition is to let players “Dig an endless tunnel, fly out to the far reaches of space, and come back again.” That’s some pretty impressive scope and it helped to win StarForge over $135,000.

Now, for fifteen of your earth pounds, you can start StarForging right away, though naturally any alpha version of a game is going to be at least somewhat limited in what it can offer. As of it’s introduction to Steam, StarForge is at version 0.3.5. The important question to ask is: what do you get for your money?

                                   

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Defenders Quest

Defender's Quest opens on a rather bleak note. After falling victim to a ravenous plague, you're tossed into the Great Pit even before you've drawn your last breath, but you somehow recover and discover within yourself the ability to travel to the world between life and death. Unfortunately, that brings you into contact with the zombie-like Revenants, who prey on the living and cannot be stopped from within the mortal realm. In spite of the dark subject matter, it's actually a rather funny game, particularly in moments involving the first barbarian you meet, who's handy in a fight but more than a little bit crazy.

The "towers" in this tower defense game are actually the characters in your party, which can grow into a small army in relatively short order. Like other such games, different types of units - which is to say, different classes of characters - have different abilities: berserkers can deal out tremendous amounts of short-range melee damage, rangers fire arrows from long distances, healers do their best to keep everyone in the fight, and so forth. You place your compatriots along the paths of the incoming enemies and then hope they've got what it takes to cut down the attackers before they get to you.

                                      

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Police Force 2

It’s not often enough that games based on emergency services are released, there’s little out there, surprising when you consider they’re everything young kids want to be. Police Force 2 is the pseudo simulator-cum-action title that sticks you in the shoes of a humble police officer out on the beat, the question is, is it really as much fun as you think?

When you're ready to hit the streets you'll start your first shift, each is randomly generated from a selection of different jobs that can generally be finished in around 5-10 minutes, allowing you the rest of your 30 minute shift answering emergency calls and generally policing your district and keeping your populace safe. Shifts will range from anything like catching speeders, busting smugglers and photographing drug dealers, they aren’t generally too exciting; however this is where emergency calls come in.

To break up the monotony of daily life you've got emergency calls, in a shift you’ll be tasked with as many as humanly possible, their spontaneity does add greatly to the game, but they also come at a price. If you may have a particularly tasking job on your shift, such as locating a number of pushers which can be tricky to track down especially during a night shift and the last thing you want is for emergency calls to crop up every couple of minutes. However, if it weren’t for emergency calls you wouldn’t get to respond to shops getting held up at gunpoint, stolen handbags or drunken homeless fights.

                                       

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Behold Studios Knights of Pen and Paper

Knights Of Pen And Paper isn’t a turn-based RPG: it’s a postmodern deconstruction of a turn-based RPG. The joke is that you’re not actually controlling a band of brave, noble adventurers – you’re controlling a group of friends sallying forth on a brave and noble Dungeons and Dragons-style pen and paper adventure. More than mere narrative dressing, the joke spills over into the mechanics.

You don’t just pick classes at the outset of Pen And Paper: you pick the real life character who’s going to fill each role. Grandma, it turns out, with her screeching, aggro-ing voice, makes for an excellent paladin.

Since you also partially control the DM, you construct your own difficulty curve, fashioning basic quests out of a limited set of ingredients and then populating the battles with as many enemies as you think you can handle. This should make things simple, but it’s surprisingly easy to get cocky and chuck an elite snake in the mix that you weren’t actually prepared for.

The turn-based system at Knights Of Pen And Paper’s heart is built from familiar pieces – classes behave as you’d expect, with rogues and mages hitting hard but needing warriors and paladins to soak up damage for them, while support classes like Druids and Priests keep everyone’s HP and MP topped up between special attacks. The main quest’s predefined battles do throw up enemy combinations that require more complex tactics, but there’s no denying that, having breached the fourth wall, Behold Studios’ charming game is content to head back inside the building.

                          

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Survivor Squad

Endless Loop Studios’ latest title doesn’t do much to enhance the zombie survival genre, and what it does present is plagued by game-ruining glitches and bugs, putting a damper on the whole experience. When a mechanic or gameplay element does work the way it should, it holds promise, but unfortunately, too much of the game doesn’t deliver enough to make this a title worth paying attention to.

Survivor Squad is essentially an RTS action game that requires players to control a team of up to four humans as they battle their way through buildings, killing hordes of infected and looting for supplies along the way. The cliche story has you and your team heading down a seemingly endless string of repetitive environments in a quest to find a scientist that has a cure, but if you’re playing this game for the narrative, you’re already off to a bad start.

You control each member of your squad in one of three ways: You can hit a corresponding number on your keyboard, left-click, or drag your mouse to form a box to encompass the character or characters to want to control. Then, by right-clicking on the map, your squad moves until they reach their destination. By holding the right mouse button down and then sliding the mouse in a direction, your selected survivors will face exactly what you tell them to. By having your squad members face different ways, each teammate can cover each others’ backs, increasing your units’ chances of survival.

                                             

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Gunpoint Special Edition 2013

Gunpoint is a prime example of a small, relatively simple game that that exudes sheer elegance. Every aspect of its clever design, laugh-out-loud noir story, tiny but expressive art, and moody music work harmoniously with one another towards creating a truly unique 2D puzzle platforming experience. Nothing feels out of place, there’s little fat needed to be trimmed. Both the act of movement and its inventive take on hacking work wonderfully throughout the entire three-hour campaign of comedic industrial espionage and murder mystery.After acquiring a pair of futuristic trousers, your private eye protagonist gains the ability to hop across the world as he sees fit. 

Early on in the 11-mission campaign, you gain the ability to flip to a silhouetted view and reroute the circuits of any building, which allows you to create environmental “if-then” equations that help you navigate various security systems. For example, you can link a security camera to a light, then reroute a nearby light switch so that flicking it causes a nearby door to swing open. With this in place, you can step in front of the camera to activate it, which causes the light to go off, which causes a guard in that darkened room try to turn them back on by flicking the light switch, which instead knocks him unconscious as the door flies open. It's supremely satisfying to see the dominos fall exactly as planned.

                                              

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Gunpoint

Gunpoint is a prime example of a small, relatively simple game that that exudes sheer elegance. Every aspect of its clever design, laugh-out-loud noir story, tiny but expressive art, and moody music work harmoniously with one another towards creating a truly unique 2D puzzle platforming experience. Nothing feels out of place, there’s little fat needed to be trimmed. Both the act of movement and its inventive take on hacking work wonderfully throughout the entire three-hour campaign of comedic industrial espionage and murder mystery.After acquiring a pair of futuristic trousers, your private eye protagonist gains the ability to hop across the world as he sees fit. 

Early on in the 11-mission campaign, you gain the ability to flip to a silhouetted view and reroute the circuits of any building, which allows you to create environmental “if-then” equations that help you navigate various security systems. For example, you can link a security camera to a light, then reroute a nearby light switch so that flicking it causes a nearby door to swing open. With this in place, you can step in front of the camera to activate it, which causes the light to go off, which causes a guard in that darkened room try to turn them back on by flicking the light switch, which instead knocks him unconscious as the door flies open. It's supremely satisfying to see the dominos fall exactly as planned.

                                              

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Towns Game

The civilians will trap themselves in pits. They will work to starvation. They will get stuck in suicide chains where one dies to a monster, so another feels compelled to go gather their bones, and then they die, and so on. Of course, this is a feature, not a bug: The challenge in games of this genre is to learn the citizens' default behaviors and modify it. You set the highest priorities to gathering and producing food. You tell them that you don't want any more bones, and you give them weapons and armor so they stop dying quite so much. You tweak zones, production schedules, and task priorities to keep everyone happy and healthy.

For example, a standard start-up sequence in Towns goes like this: Do some logging, create a zone for carpentry, build a carpenters' table and a wood detailer. Then mine some stone, and make a masonry area, and then make a mason's bench. Then till some fields, gather some wheat, and plant it. Then make a bakery, equipped with a mill, an oven, and a bakers table. Then you take wheat to the mill, which produces flour, which you then bake into bread, which your civilians can now eat.

                                               

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Nancy Drew Ghost of Thornton Hall

It’s the middle of the night, and the sound of your phone ringing shatters the silence. Do you answer? If you’re Nancy Drew, then of course you do! In Ghost of Thornton Hall, Nancy’s 28th adventure, that midnight call takes her to the sticky American subtropics of an island off the coast of Georgia. There she’s asked to look into the case of a missing girl, but in doing so she’ll have to contend with the legend of a ghost haunting a rundown mansion. Despite the eerie locale and a fascinating family history, you won’t find too many scares in and around Thornton Hall, and you may find the rambling story difficult to follow, but anyone up for another mystery with the popular teen sleuth will be in for a fairly fun time exploring this dilapidated southern house and solving its bountiful puzzles.

The late-night caller is Savannah Woodham, a paranormal investigator Nancy met in a previous outing, Shadow at the Water's Edge. She’s a firm believer in ghosts, including the reported ghost of Charlotte Thornton, who died tragically when she was 21. But this newest case from the same family, involving a missing bride-to-be Jesslyn Thornton, requires someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts, a skeptic like Nancy.

                                      

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Virtual Families 2 Our Dream House

Last Days of Work loves virtual Sims. I mean seriously loves them, at least according to their lead designer. And, well, their product line, which includes the massively popular Virtual Villagers series. For those of us who love messing with the lives of little virtual people without all that faffing about on an island, Last Day of Work created  Virtual Families, a game that features all the animated people without all the exploding volcanoes. Now they've come out with a sequel to that fabulous game, Virtual Families 2: Our Dream House, which deepens the gameplay of the original in new and interesting ways!

Virtual Families 2 begins, as many families do, with a single person and a place to live. Once you've chosen a character to start things with, your next goal is to get them working, marry them off, encourage a few children to spring along, and help take care of the wreck of a place the family calls home. 

                              

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UnEpic 2013

UnEpic is the product of what is pretty much a one-man operation; Francisco Téllez de Meneses is the sole person behind the concept, design, programming, story and dialogue and even the soundtrack for the game. According to the author, the game's biggest source of inspiration was The Maze of Galious.

Daniel, the protagonist, is having a Dungeons & Dragons session at a friend's house when the beer kicks in and he needs to go to the bathroom. There, the lights go out and none of his friends reply to him. All is silent and when he turns on his Zippo lighter, he suddenly finds himself in and old medieval castle, filled with enemies and traps. Equipped with his wits, quirky remarks and all the loot he can find, Daniel sets out to explore the castle's 200 rooms and find out just what exactly is going on...

Assigning ability points to any of the weapon types in the game will make you more proficient with them, namely by automatically increasing your normal damage and your critical hit chances and consequent damage with that given weapon class.

                                             

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Train Simulator 2013 Deluxe

Just about every little boy gets a kick out of trains. Whether it's a model railway or a ride on an historic steam locomotive, there's something about trains that satisfy the desire for power and speed.

For new players, TS2013 is a great time to don your driver's uniform as the interface has had a major overhaul to make the a lot more user-friendly than before.

When you load the game, you'll see the new Collection screen, which provides a nice overview of the routes and locomotives you own. Routes have a green bar across the bottom, with locos having a blue bar.

Thanks to better integration with Steam, you'll also see related DLC (downloadable content) so you can click on a route or engine to open the Steam interface and by the extras.

For the standard version of TS2013, you get the excellent modern London to Brighton route, complete with the new Class 377 Electrostar trains. There's also the popular Isle of Wight route, and two US routes: Sherman Hill and Northeast Corridor. For an extra £10, the forthcoming Deluxe Edition also comes with the brand new Munich-Augsburg route, and the ICE 3 train.

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Wildlife Park 2 Dino World

Wildlife Park 2 is a 3-D business simulation game involving building, maintaining, and amending a zoo to keep a steady income and happy visitors. The game has sixty five different species of animal and thirty species of plant, including such diverse creatures as crocodiles, pelicans, and gorillas. Aquatic creatures include the giant squid and orca. Food production is a key part of certain missions, as well as the ability to train specific animal species to increase their sales value. Herbivores can eat from plants provided the plant produces food resources, which can be an easy way to save money. Gene resources on certain maps, when gathered by use of the research lab, can allow you to clone prehistoric animals, virtually all of them having a 6 Star Rating (Some exceptions include the Smilodon, which is only 5 Stars). 

The designs of the Gastornis, Basilosaurus and Entelodont are based on their depictions fromWalking with Beasts almost exactly while the Woolly Mammoth is a combination of the Wild New World, Before We Ruled the Earth and What Killed The Mega Beasts designs and the Smilodon is based on its Wild New World and Monsters We Met designs. On the cover 2 extra animals are shown they are a Cockatoo and an Indian Elephant it is possible they were deleted from the final game.

                                   
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Neighbours from Hell 1 & 2

Neighbours From Hell arrived to some consternation from the staff, followed by a slight amount of passing around, until eventually it fell down to me. It's like a helter-skelter effect with new games, you see: one look at the box, or a quick five minutes, usually determines who's going to get the game, with the really odd ones spiralling down through the ranks until they arrive on my lap. Neighbours From Hell got to the bottom rung pretty quickly it has to be said, but after a day or so I'm certainly not complaining, which really is quite unexpected.

I wasn't, for example, expecting to be reminded of the golden days of the LucasArts point-and-clicker, or expecting to be greeted by a simplistic yet strangely effective 2D engine, and I certainly didn't expect to start panicking when the bumbling fat-arsed neighbour blundered into the lounge, completely blowing away my chances of pulling off a carefully arranged series of life-threatening booby traps that he'd caught me setting up.

Neighbours From Hell is sort of a cross between Spy vs. Spy and Monkey Island. You, as a chap called Woody, are a contestant on the eponymous reality TV show and your goal is to boost audience ratings by playing practical jokes on your hapless neighbour as effectively as possible. You never take anything into the neighbour's house with you, and so your first task will involve searching for objects that can help you along. This is where the Monkey Island part comes in, as you begin picking up random objects and using them with other random objects until something works.

 
 
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Surviving High School

Though pretty popular over in Japan, text adventures and dating sims are still a rarity here in the States -- but DSiWare seems like the appropriate place for them to appear, if they're going to make a move on this market. Electronic Arts has checked in a contender in the uncontested space this week, called Surviving High School. And while it might be a fair first step into the dialogue-heavy, gameplay-lite genre for DSi owners, its subject matter leaves a little something to be desired -- because, well, most all of us have had enough high school drama in our real lives to need a second dose of it virtually.

Surviving High School places you in the role of a new student at Centerscore High.

You choose your name and appearance, then step into a sequence of text-based interactions with different students and teachers at the school -- your dialogue choices in these interactions then direct which of several possible paths your character will take through life. Will you pursue popularity, trying to become the Homecoming King? Will you hit the gym every day, seeking to buff up and become a football star? Or will you focus on your studies, aligning yourself with Centerscore's nerd corps?

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