the Flexible survival games, *very adult*
Okay after Xoron's mention of the mud in the five muds topic I decided to look over the initial glulx game a bit more, and indeed two of it's subsidiary games, this also lead to a complete revamp of the Flexible survival entry Read it here.
Before we go on, note that all flexible survival games and indeed the universe their set in are very much adult, r rated, complete with fairly extreme, actually over the top descriptions of forced sexual intercourse with monstrous creatures in extremely! graphic detail, so if your uncomfortable with such turn bakck now (this is one reason I'm just providing the db entry link and not the link to the blog directly, so people will have ample opportunities to read up on the games before trying them).
Actually I'll admit myself part of the reason I wanted to try the game was to see if I could now handle it, being that when I suffered severe g enophobia I tried the single game but found it too uncomfortable.
I have not played the mud yet but have tried all three single player games, both the initial flexible survival, also societies and the prequel flexible infection.
The prequel seems a little bare bones and mostly involved in showing off how quickly a bunch of mobs can be mutated.
Flexible societies I love the idea of, but I wish more work went into the game, for example, I coudlnt' find how to assign researchers to expand my populations pool of things like buildable buildings, likewise I don't know what could be built generally. The notes say flexible societies is basically a demonstration game, but I did wonder if there were any plans to continue work on it.
Now as to flexible survival itself. I did find I enjoyed the mechanics, however I was finding, especially when using the wiki that a few things where somewhat obscure, eg, how to get quests and such to activate, though I d
o like the fact that most npcs have a talk command. in particular, I was always confused as to when "explore" could be used at a given district of the city to generate random adventures around that area, or when it could be used to get somewhere else or reveal a new location, this especially became a problem when I got a quest requiring me to go and explore somewher,e like the firefighter quest.
I also found very little by way of armour and absolutely no weapons which basically meant unless I took the extra strength points at start I was screwed (literally and often). This especially happened when I ran in to that dam wyvern, who seemed to be tough as nails and was a situation that got worse as I leveled up, since levelling up seemed to give one more stat bonus but didn't necessarily increase combat stats.
Admitedly, losing in combat isn't too badd mechanically, but it could make the game a bit futile and not in a good way. I wonder if part of t
his was the lack of equipment, and in particular the lack of credits, since I noticed some good items to use for credits but I never seemed to have many of them on me since it seemed if you lose in combat you lose credits.
I was rather disappointed as well that the "givein" command to give in to your infections and essentially get the ending where you lost all your sanity fully became whatever mutant you currently were didn't seem to work.
As to the game on the hole, to be honest I do wish I could distinguish the actual story content from the shock value and grose out factor.
Really the descriptions are so absolutely insane I couldn't take them seriously, indeed I will say comparing anything said to real love making makes the game feel rather childish, especially with the rather blatantly self done crude language, indeed I did rather wonder if the crudity factor went a bit too far since I did find it obscuring aspects of the game, eg, when I wanted an npc to just give me a quest or an objective, or be able to buy useful rpg type of stuff from and basically every npc, even when not a monster seemed to be described iin terms of whether or not I would want to use the f*ck command on them.
On the plus side, I did enjoy exploring the city, and some of the mutants in and of themselves are fairly unique, even if I did get a little weary of reading about their various attributes, I was also glad I got nvda to work with the glulx window.
So aside from that I have a questions about the mud.
Reading the newbie guide I love the idea of crafting and combat, but there is a lot about the automap, especially in terms of jobs, actually the jobs system mentioned in other cities sounded really unique, giving you esentially gamebook adventures and mastermind puzzles to do, though it sounded very grpahical.
how necessary is! the auto map to play? Do you need it for things like missions? since it i s referenced heavily in the help files.
Another thing I could not work out was to what extent many of the things you got like professions, perks and abilities were related to rp, and to what extent related to in game activities? It was hard to tell from their descriptionns, indeed on the rp front I actually liked the idea of a mud that had real character stats to rp with and even gms who would run scenes with stat checks, puzzles, fights etc.
I also wonder in mud how doable the turn based combat is, or at least how wordy.
again I do not know if I plan on playing the mud, indeed I don't know if I will continue much with the single player, since the focus on insane levels of shocking insanely sexual content did get a bit on my nurves after a while, though if I can get a bit more into the rpg side of that I might be inclined to.
Still I don't we have had a topic that really addresses these games in detail as! games, so I thought one mig
ht be interesting to compare experiences, ---- heck maybe it might be fun to let the developer know that not all blind people are nuns or monks as most of the mainstream community think, although for myself I will say I found flexible survival a rather long way from erotic .
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