Since I am dealing with some pretty exciting insomnia right now, I figure now is a great chance to revisit my long-neglected website. No, not to finish the INXS ranking (though I am promising myself right now that I’ll finish that before 2022) but with a very important list that I’ve been rolling around in my head for about 70 minutes while staring at what I can only assume is the ceiling.
So, here is my ranked list of top ten games that I just came up with right now.
10. Age of Mall-pires
This is a turn-based game that uses the layouts from actual malls (both active and long closed) as game maps. You’re the owner of one of the tiny stores in the mall but you want to take over the entire place. Send out your minimum wage employees to conquer Record Town and Cassette World! Establish supply chains with the Southwest cuisine stall in the food court! Level up your peons to Assistant Manager! Will you be able to control the entire mall before Christmas season or will you be defeated by the last Sears still in operation? Play in any year from 1956 through today. Strip mall DLC coming out Summer, 2022.
9. Mists of Moby
Set in the heyday of 90’s electronica, this roguelike will let you experience what it was like to try to get home after a particularly good rave. It’s before the advent of Lyft (indeed, before the advent of “everyone has a mobile phone”) and mass transport doesn’t run after 2 in your mid-size city. Also, you’ve done a whole lot of some designer drug or other and nothing seems familiar to you. Can you navigate your way home past wary strangers that all look something like elves to you right now? Are you talking to a police officer, a bloodthirsty zombie or a pine tree? Is this your apartment and if it isn’t, why is the door open? On advanced mode, you start in the bathroom stall at the venue and try to find your way to the door. Make it to your destination before your mood totally crashes.
8. Wu-Tang Bam!
This is a platformer where you play a Wu-Tang Clan fan who is desperate to liberate the only existing copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin from the mansion of imprisoned hedge fund bro Martin Shkreli. Mentored by a force projection of Method Man, you sneak into his deserted mansion and have to leap over boxes of overpriced medications and avoid a bunch of his old friends who will try to corner you and talk about NFTs. You also have to avoid RZA and producer Cilvaringz who want to prevent anyone from hearing it until the 2100’s – without disrespecting them because, jeez, it’s RZA. Spoiler: the levels keep getting more difficult but the album is always in another mansion.
7. Extreme Tween Sports
When you were a kid, did you play street hockey? Or some 2 on 1 football variation? Or baseball using whiffle bats and tennis balls? In this extreme sports simulator, you pick the sport (or sports) and you make the rules. Any sport can have as few as 1 or as many kids as lived in your neighborhood. Make bases and goals out of your t-shirt, crushed drink cup or lazy, unlikely to move sheepdog. Select equipment from playground grade kickballs to poorly assembled push broom hockey sticks. Assign ages to players – want the local 13-year-old jock to single handedly take on 7 third graders at tackle football? Done. Have your heroic plays interrupted by cars or by your toddler sibling wandering out into the makeshift softball diamond and having a meltdown until you agree to let them play pitcher for 12 excruciating minutes. But decide on the game and the rules fast because you only have 25 minutes before Kelly has to go home for dinner!
6. Untitled 70’s Celebrity Poster Game
In this dating sim, you are a 14-year-old living in 1979. Your room is full of posters of your favorite 70’s artists. You get to choose from stars like Burt Reynolds, Jimi Hendrix, Farrah Fawcett Majors, Bruce Lee, Cheryl Tiegs, Kiss and up to 14 other popular stars of the day. Then you get to try and convince your celebrity crushes to come and hang out with you in your room, but they are posters and never say anything back. You have close to 500 dialogue options, none of which will result in a response (except maybe from your cruel sibling pretending to be Woody from the Bay City Rollers with the worst fake Scottish accent imaginable). Every session of the game ends with you going to bed lonely and confused.
5. Chesapeake, VA: The Game
Our programs spent 6 years recreating every single detail of Chesapeake, Virginia to bring you this remarkable open world experience. Every house, every store, every detail of the Great Dismal Swamp brought to stunning 3D life. You can play a Walmart employee, a Dollar Tree employee or a temp with Tidewater staffing. Not a fictional character either – we got every single person living and working in Chesapeake in 2014 to agree for their lives and likenesses to be part of our game. We are that committed to realism. Maybe you can solve some of their life problems – both the critical and mundane – better than they did. That is, in fact, how we calculate your score – did you do better than the real person? This is the perfect game if you live in Chesapeake and agreed to be part of the game and want to try and make better life choices. We plan to add a Norfolk, VA expansion as soon as everyone in that city signs their releases.
4. Overwhelmed
Ms. Dunsmore’s third grade class has a sub today and things have gotten complete out of control in this first-person shooter. Tear off little pieces of the test paper Mr. Ron from the sub service hands out, chew them up and make amazing spitballs. Upgrade your spitball ability with straws smuggled back into class from the cafeteria or by dismantling your ball point pens. Construct more painful ammo by wadding your spitballs around unbent staples. Get the bathroom pass and go for a spitball rampage down the entire second grade hallway. Play solo, 1 on 1 or in our new cafeteria battle royale mode.
3. Pooker
Sorry, there’s no fecal content in this poker simulator. Pooker is a poker simulator designed by a team that has never played poker. All we told them was that it was a card game. Why did they choose the Rider Tarot Deck? Heck, why not? Predict your future and win “that pile of money that they put in the middle of the table.” Will everyone have to strip? Can anyone explain what a flush is? Will this game ever end? Well, you’ll have to read the cards in Pooker!
2. Game of Games
In order to play this board game, you will need to have 30 other popular family games in your library, including Settlers of Catan, Candyland, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Yahtzee and many more! Each square on this board corresponds to one of those games. Roll your six-sided die, move your token and then play whatever game you land on. Winner of that game gets to roll next. First player to make three laps around the board wins! Fun for the whole family that can literally last months.
1. Game Developer Online
This MMORPG is set entirely in the offices of a software development company that makes MMORPGS. You can play a coder, designer, HR person, contractor, executive or any other role you’d find at a typical software company. You have a deadline coming up and have to deal with anxiety, co-workers leaving for better paying jobs, and lots of meetings where they talk about how this workplace is like a family. Try to preserve relationships with your family over Facetime, knowing in your heart you may never see them while they’re awake again. Make unreasonable promises to your game’s fans and then start the process of identifying who should be blamed when you fail to deliver. Publish poorly thought-out social media posts that create so much trouble you have to hire a firm to repair your company’s reputation. Endgame content includes unionization/union busting and deciding how honest to be at shareholder meetings.