I'm a sucker for ALife games. With my life long interest in AI and ALife, I just can't pass up a game that promises "real life interaction" with a game character. I've tried most of them: Fin-Fin, Creatures, Catz, Dogz, Black & White, Max the Parrot, etc.

So when I was bargin bin shopping this weekend I ran across a game I just couldn't pass up: "Sprite Life"! Ah! Sound sooo promising, say it with me "Sprite Life"!. The box promised "Real Pets. Real World" and "realisim of state-of-the-art virtual reality". SOLD! Forget that the artwork on the box looked like it was printed with a 10 year old inkjet printer and the price was $4.99 - I had to have it!

I got home and installed the game without delay. I honestly thought it was a joke. The "state of the art 3D world" was... well... I just can't explain how bad it is. If this was a 10 year old game I could understand but it was released in 2004. I wrote a quick-and-dirty OpenGL landscape editor that looke 1,000 times better than this. It looked like something straight out of chapter 3 from "Teach Yourself DirectX in 24 Hours". Horrible textures, sharp edges, clipping problems, it was laughable. I could have written this game in an afternoon. But don't take my word for it, here's a screen shots of the "spectacular views" (click on it to see a bigger image):
 

Then there are the "pets" that enhabit this "world". They obviously have a limited set of "canned" phrases they "think" and they make no sense. Each pet has a meter for "love", "energy", "food", and "water". The water meter will be at 100% while they're thinking "I'm Thirsty". "Love" will be near zero and they think "I Love You".

Well, I thought, perhaps these are just the "out of the box" pets. After all, the box advertized that you can get your very own unique pet... there will be no other like it in the world. So I went to the web site to get my pet, and had to get 6. Six "unique" pets that all look the same. I re-started the game to see my new pets and now there were 9 running around. The audio was enough to make me stick an ice pick in my ear, and their behavior was like nine 5 year old on crystal meth. Did I metion these are the ugliest things I've ever seen in my life? I've seen cuter creatures playing Doom 3.

At least I got a good laugh and it only chewed up 46.7 MB of my hard drive... what they did with all those megabyes I'll never know. But I know if I happen to run across their latest game: "WILD LIFE! The Ultimate Animal Park Simulator" I won't be able to resist buying it. You can see (and hear) all about it at: http://spritelife.com/wildlife/... be sure to read the "developer's diary".