Filed under: Games, Time-Wasters
Lose/Lose - a play-at-your-own-risk Time Waster
by Jay Hathaway Oct 5th 2009
Lose/lose is a space shooter that offers completely boring, uninspired gameplay ... until you realize you're risking your data to play it. The aliens you fight are generated by the game based on random files on your hard drive. When you blow one up, the file is deleted, too. If your ship is destroyed, lose/lose deletes itself. The thing is, the aliens don't actually shoot back at you, so it's unclear why you should shoot them at all. Lose/lose is meant to raise a lot of important questions, but the intended message is somewhat jumbled. Is this a game about how much we value our data, and what risks we're willing to take with it? Or is it about our unquestioned assumption that having weapons in a game means you need to use those weapons? Even if the relationship between these two big ideas is unclear, one thing's for sure: the only way to win at lose/lose is not to play.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
