Real Life- The Definitive Review Part 1

I have heard multiple jokes when people say 'I went outside today. The graphics were great but the story was terrible' so I thought I'd tell the rest of the joke. I apologise for inactivity, personal statements can be hell to write. Again, this will be in three parts to pace it out.

Some of you may have heard of the interactive experience known as ‘life’. Released in an alpha form millions of years ago, it slowly crawled into beta millions of years after that and was released 50,000 years ago. Developed and published by a mysterious figure by the pseudonym ‘God’, it’s caused quite the buzz recently. Available in all countries and languages, the huge availability has really given this free-to-play massively multiplayer role-playing-game the kick it needs. I decided to delve in, to find and evaluate life’s mysteries.

                Going into the game, you are assigned a gender, name, time period and other useful character elements that come into play later. Unfortunately there is no customisation with things like appearance and personality traits, but after a certain number of years there are minor adjustments you can make such as in the name and skills. The beginning few years are quite forgettable, at time of writing I can’t remember at all what happened. I only know that I was still finding the controls a bit hard to handle- it takes a few in-game years to get used to them.

                The game has a steep learning curve that you must master in order to stay on the ball. To begin with, everything is easy-going as other characters will help you out with most tasks. As time goes on you are given your own independence. This can be a nice feature as it lets you learn and use skills at your own pace, however as time goes on you are required to hone your skills and failing this the game gets much harder. The controls for the majority of the game are standard although I found the movement a bit stilted near the end of the game. There are also some bugs which affect movement, such as drugs and alcohol. A large amount of players have taken it upon themselves to abuse these bugs as often as possible.

                Regarding the soundtrack, there is a huge array of music due to a feature that lets players create their own music. . There are a multitude of strands or ‘genres’ of music to choose from, such as Jazz, Rock or Baroque. This has led to an incredible diversity in sounds, but has also created a bizarre effect among members of the community- for each genre of music, there is a group of die-hard fans who claim that this is the one true music and all other music is false, and there is another group who claim that it isn’t music. This odd and sometimes divisive issue has plenty of theories as to how it came about, but no real answer. The only thing for sure is that anyone who judges a game by the soundtrack is an idiot.
Which order do I do these in again? Tom Bedford  16/10/2013 16:23