Thousand Dollar Soul

Link to game

Guess what?  I made a game!  I made a game, I made a game.

No, its not Thousand Dollar Soul, that would be silly.  Me review/comment/discuss a game I made?  Retarded!

Seriously though, to celebrate the first installment of my DHTML game Beneath the Shadows of Cydonia, I'm looking at the game that I credit for some of the idea for.  That game is Thousand Dollar Soul, a flash game in the Interactive Fiction genre...

Yeah, one of those games.  Many hear "Interactive Fiction" and think "Pretentious game with no 'gameplay' whatsoever."  These games harken to the day of the 'choose your adventure' storybooks that fell out of favour when enough of us realized how stupidly easy it is to program such a game.  It is one of the reasons why Beneath the Shadows of Cydonia went this route.  That and my graphic art sucks (thank you Hero Machine!).

Digression aside, the game, if I can call it that, follows an awkward teenage boy named Todd, who gets a visit from his future self, with a determined desire to get Todd hitched with the girl of his dreams: the elusive Angela.

Gameplay revolves around reading a wall of text, and from that deciding from a list of options what to do based on what was read.  This post won't be as image intensive as the game screen at any given time looks a lot like this:

Now I should also note that this has multiple endings, and a little achievements system that encourages you to get all the endings.  Sigh.

Though I should note that the music is really fantastic.  There are only three tones in the game, but they are highly atmospheric and seem to fit in with whatever is happening in the story.  Other than the usual looping to annoyance that I've started to expect from game music this shit is amazing.

Ok, its IF, so if you really hate reading this isn't for you.  There, I saved you some reading.

To further this, gameplay ends up going into "scrub the timeline" mode where you just randomly click options just to get another ending out of it, making individual choices meaningless.  This was where I departed with Thousand Dollar Soul when I made Beneath the Shadows of Cydonia, where I tried to have the choices mean so much more than that.

Still though, I can't go on about this game without bringing up our favourite mature woman who is screwing the immortal friend of her parents.  So...

I totally saw that one... spoilers ahoy!

Now, if I may, the first time I played though this I went with my instincts.  I tell Angela that I knew of her mother's heart attack because I had psychic powers.  I tell my future self to shove his 'angelfire' up his ass (by the way I Google searched this out of morbid curiosity and I am pleased to inform you that there is no such drug).  I claim to love Angela and I stop my future self from peeping at her in the bathroom.  Seriously, what kind of pervert monster did I become?  Course, I defend Angela from muggers, marry here years later and tell her to get her brain scanned as she had a tumor in it.  It ends with me talking to her conscience in a computer of sorts.

In that run alone I get the impression that my future self is someone that can't (and shouldn't) be trusted, and in later playthroughs... fuck is the future Todd a piece of work.  He spends the story trying to get me to take advantage of Angela, and there are moments where he tries to get in on it.  In some playthroughs I find that the police are on to him for something really horrible.

Now, the title of the game sounds really weird, and I can say that this does get explained, while there is the loaming question of whether or there is actual time-travel involved, or if everything is from the perspective of a character in a simulation.  There are some really trippy moments, like one where the perspective shifts to Angela.

I think I can say that while the story starts of a bit slow this little flash game might actually be better than the AAA title Heavy Rain.  There is a sense of intrigue that this game brings that does make the repeat plays necessary to understand what the fuck is going on, but if you don't have the patiences to do that much reading this is not for you.

Oh, and play Beneath the Shadows of Cydonia prologue.

Yes, I feel very ashamed.  Why ask?