Tag: management

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A game about sacrificing villagers will challenge belief systems

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices. In publisher Kitfox Games’s upcoming The Shrouded Isle, those sacrifices are lives. It’s a cult village management game to be released in February 2017 by design lead Jongwoo Kim, writer Tanya Short, and artist Erica Lahaie. The Shrouded Isle is meant as a haunting game that forces players to contemplate the lengths they’d go to provide for their people. This goes beyond the food and shelter they must provide for those who live in the village, as the player must placate the gods, too—by offering up a human life. It’ll be a game that evokes apathetic power outside of human…
Conveni Dream
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Conveni Dream tries to make management sympathetic

The dream starts small. It feels big, but in the grander scheme of life and business, it is small. You have a convenience store, and a small one at that—just a few shelves and one part-time helper. But maybe—just maybe—it can be something more. If you work hard, if you make the right choices, and if everything goes your way. If, if, if. This is both the promise of small-time entrepreneurship and of Conveni Dream, a new game for Nintendo 3DS that turns the challenges of starting a small business into a colorful joyride. Sure, there are stakes—some will build…
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Before gets NSFW in its latest update (but it’s still beautiful as heck)

Before is a new spin on the survival game from Rust developer Facepunch Studios where, rather than controlling a single character, players must lead a whole tribe of cave people to survive in an intimidating post-Ice Age world. Up until now, we’ve had a few opportunities to gawk at the game’s naturalistic vistas and see early glimpses of how the player’s tribespeople interact with both the environment and each other. But thanks to a new update over on Before’s blog, we now have a better idea of the specifics on how they’ll live and fight in this still young society.…
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Before continues to take shape as the prettiest prehistorical survival game

Cavemen games seem to be the next big thing, a natural evolution of the survival genre. Now that the post-apocalypse is becoming a little tired, it makes sense to reach way back to pre-civilization for something fresh. Big titles like Far Cry Primal and WiLD may be the ones people are talking about, but the first recent example that comes to my mind is Before. Before had its biggest public debut during The Game Awards last year, but its creators over at Facepunch Studios (behind Garry’s Mod and Rust) have been posting updates here and there on the game’s progress…
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Crow money, crow problems

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Crowtel (PC)  BY Sinks Imagine this: you’re just another crow hotel manager, living their simple life and minding their own business. You don’t want to be the next Ritz Carlton or anything—your aspirations are much more laid back than that. You just want to keep your business afloat without much effort. But, one day, some fat cats from the health department come in for an inspection, threatening the livelihood of your Crowtel. Now you’re finally forced to face all those niggling death traps you’ve…
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A videogame about sacrificing townspeople to an unseen god

The Sacrifice, made by team foxboard for a Ludum Dare is, at first glance, a difficult-to-impossible resource management game. Players direct a town comprised of five families, assigning seasonal tasks and trying to maintain enough housing, food reserves, morale, and secrecy. At the same time, players also act as executioner. At the end of each season, one townsperson must be sacrificed to maintain the graces of their god. Morality has little to no place in your decision making. Morality has little to no place in your decision making. A murderer may be well-liked and their death may cause more civil…
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The original SimCity guide was basically a textbook on urban development

Back when the first SimCity was released in 1989, the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine, Johnny L. Wilson, was commissioned to write a guide for the city management sim called The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook. In a manner befitting the complexity of the original SimCity, Wilson didn’t just want to confine his explanations of the game’s mechanics to the context of the game itself, but expand on those theories beyond the simulation, shedding light on the real-life parallels SimCity is built on. A city is a machine with many moving parts  Richard Moss has a long, detailed post on…
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Painters Guild lets you play with history to discover how the Mona Lisa came to be

Even people who don’t give a shit about art are aware of the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. If you think you’re an exception then let me destroy that notion for you. Heard of the Mona Lisa? Statue of David? How about The Creation of Adam? If you have (and, yes, you definitely have) then you are one of us.  But what of it? We all know about these pieces of art, but many people probably don’t know why they’re so famed, nor do they care that much to find out either. For the majority of people, the stories and…