Game of Life for Windows

I remember playing the Game of Life as a child with my family. Along with Monopoly and Scrabble, Life was certainly one of our favorite games to play together. I'm not sure that it helps to teach any particularly significant values to kids through playing the game, but it certainly is fun. I suppose you could say that it helps teach the value of a dollar, or something.

At any rate, I was re-introduced to the well-aged Game of Life not too long ago, albeit in a slightly new form. My girlfriend Cathi gave it to me as part of a birthday present, because she said it was cheap and she thought it looked cute. I hadn't been aware that there was a computer version of Life out there, and I kinda assumed it would be pretty dumb. After all, games that are really, really inexpensive are usually that way for a reason -- either because they're old or because they suck and no one will buy them, or both.

We were surprised to find, however, that the game seemed both relatively recent and very well-made. We popped the CD into my computer's CD tray, and a cute little animation popped up almost immediately. After waiting just a minute or two for the program to install itself from the disc onto my hard drive, the two of us started a game. Personally, I was actually pretty impressed by the quality of the animations throughout the game.

To tell the truth, I would have expected a much simpler, more basic design. For example, for those of you who are acquainted with the original board game, you may remember that players, along with their husbands and wives, are represented by little, plastic pegs (blue for male and pink for female, of course). In this CD-ROM version, however, the characters are these kinda cutesy, fully-animated cartoon people. Instead of being little, plastic rectangles with six holes in them like in the board game, the cars in this version are these sweet-looking convertibles. Basically, for every little thing that happens in the game, there's some neat animation to go along with it that will pop up on your screen to entertain you. As a result, you will find that this game takes awhile to complete.

One notable difference between this game and the original is that you have the option of choosing the "Enhanced" version. Basically, this allows you to play what they call "Life's Little Games," which are just simple games of chance that give you the opportunity to get a whole bunch of money at one time -- or nothing. I think they go along pretty well with the overall concept with the game itself.

This game is great fun, but I'm not sure how much it holds in the way of replayability. To tell the truth, I never played it again after those first several times on the night that I got it. I'm not exactly sure why that is, except for the fact that the games run pretty long and I don't often have time for one. I would also think that this Game of Life will tend to get somewhat old once you've seen all of the animations. After all, even in just our second or third game, the two of us were getting sick of some of them.

Nevertheless, if you see a chance to pick up this cute, silly game for a few bucks, I would definitely recommend it! I'm sure you'll have fun, at least the first few times.