If you want the education, you’ll have to enroll for one of the classes at the university. You can try for something a little higher up, sure, but the game will just tell you that there aren’t any openings, or that you don’t have the experience or education, and that’ll drain even more time from you. The first thing you have to do when you start a game is get a job at the employment agency, but the problem is the only job the game will more than likely let you have will be a fry cook at the Monolith Burger. This is an economy where a week’s worth of soda can cost you as much as $77, while enrolling for college will only cost you about half that. Speaking of eating, here’s the main issue with Jones in the Fast Lane and its universe: The economy, for lack of a better is term, is FUBAR. The game couldn’t care less if you buy a week’s worth of French fries or a week’s worth of cheeseburgers, the cheeseburgers will just cost you more. You can get food at the local Monolith Burger (It’s a Sierra game, there’s gotta be a Space Quest reference in there somewhere), but oddly enough, the different food items you can get don’t seem to have any difference at all between them. There’s also ways to actually lose time at the start of each week, by forgetting to eat. The challenge, basically, is to manage your time as well as you can so you can take care of your basic needs as well as actually do the stuff you need to do to actually win. Once you run out of time, your turn ends and the game moves on to the next player. Doing nearly anything will take some time from you, from moving across the board do performing actions at one of the locations you can visit. Each of your turns represents one “week” for you, and the time you have to spend for each week is shown by the clock at the bottom of the screen. The board itself is a map of the city the game takes place in, with various locations you can visit to take care of your various needs. Actually playing against him is best avoided, as he tends to be able to play the game much better than you possibly can. Once you’re done with that, you can choose to play with Jones, a cartoony AI opponent, and his level of AI. You can set these higher and lower to change the length of the game, and the other players can set them higher and lower to give themselves an edge or a handicap. Each player also gets four meters they can set to decide how much “Wealth”, “Happiness”, “Education”, and “Career” they need to win the game. If you plan to play this with other people, be prepared to get into fistfights over who gets to be ’80s Guy. You’ve got a guy with a, to be blunt, porn ‘stache, two middle aged women, and a guy who looks like the distilled essence of the ’80s. Each player also gets to select from one of four dorky looking digitized sprites to represent themselves. You’re perfectly welcome to play the game entirely by yourself, and while it’s not the most exciting way to play, it does give you a way to get a hold on how the game works. Basically, it’s what you get when you cross the old board game Life with Sierra’s own perfected brand of unending brutality.įrom the start, you have the choice of playing the game with from one to four human players. Jones in the Fast Lane is probably one of their most unusual games, however, because it takes the idea of simulating a life, that is, your own, and putting it into the form of a board game. Sierra tended to experiment a lot when they weren’t making adventure games, including licensing Japanese PC games or making sports games. One game everybody tends to forget when it comes to actually simulating a life, though, is Sierra’s Jones in the Fast Lane. It is a concept that would be revived and milked for every penny it was worth with The Sims and its uncountable number of expansions, sequels, and spin-offs. Life simulator games may not be the most popular genre when you compare to first person shooters or fighting games, but they’ve been around since the days of the Commodore 64, with the release of Activision’s Little Computer People, a game where you mostly sat and watched an animated person run around your monitor doing random things.
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