Choice of games
| title: | Choice of games |
| url: | link |
| download page: | No link! |
| license: | Variable |
| genre: | Gamebooks |
| developer: | Choice of games |
| platform: | Online web brouser, Iphone, Android, steam for windows |
| release: | 2009 ongoing |
| features: | text |
| last edit by: | Dark |
Description
Choice of games are a series of text gamebook adventures that take interactive story telling back to it's very routes, indeed in many respects they are based on the very first gamebooks, childrens choose your own adventure books from the 1980's. The basic principle is extremely simple, as is the mode of play. just read the description of what's going on, choose your action and hit next. unlike with fighting fantasy or other gamebooks there are no dice rolls to worry about, neither do you have to input complex commands or juggle mechanics, just making choices. Where however the format in Choice of games expands on this is in the very careful nature of the choices required of you, and the distinctly unique character stats. Rather than having standard rpg like stats that steadily increase over time, the stats in the choice of games adventures are set up to make choices have maximum impact. For instance, in their first game, the 19th century naval adventure Choice of broardsides, one stat is loyalty vs independence, indicating how much you are loyal to king and country and how much out for yourself. It is making these sorts of complex value judgements and seeing their impact upon the story that makes the choice of games work so well, combined with a writing style that ranges from humerous to deadly serious.
One interesting fact, is one of the main programmers of choice of games, Dan fabulich, was the same person to port Alter ego to a modern windows environment.
The original games written by choice of games are all available on their site, with new games coming out frequently. Settings vary from living the life of a fire spouting, town ravaging dragon, to joining the world of a vampire. Become a super hero, captain of a starship, or endure the zombi appocalypse. if you want something closer to home, try becoming an estate agent trying to sell a haunted house, play politics, romance and intreague at the royal court, or hike out to brazil as the worlds' most daring archaeologist.
Of course, all the games being pure text with no images at all, are extremely accessible, simply requiring standard web page navigation around the choice of games site, and use of radial buttons to select choices. Just remember to hit the "show stats" button to keep track of your progress or even save your game.
The iphone and Android versions of the games are also highly accessible, requiring nothing but flicking through the links and buttons to play.
The games save automatically, however make sure that you have cookies enabled in your browser if your playing via the Choiceofgames site.
As well as producing their own games, Choice of games also offer the choice of scripting language which can be used to program similar choice based games. Many of these efforts, some of which as good as the site's own original games, can be found Here on the choice of site or by searching for hosted games in the Ios Ap store or Google store. Further information about scripting, a detailed faq and set of tutorials can be found on the choice of games site if you would like to write your own choice based game.
Most of the hosted games created by other authors and several of the original Choiceofgames titles such as Choice of the dragon and Choice of Broardsides are freely available to play online , and may similarly be downloaded for free on the Iphone or with Android, though note that the mobile versions do contain adds at the bottom of the screen that can be removed at a cost of two dollars (though these adds do not in any way interfere with screen reader functioning being at the bottom of pages and in fact you will likely rarely see them).
several free games, plus some Demos that end in cliffhangers can be played online on the choiceofgames website. full versions can be bought either directly on the choiceofgames site with a creddit card through an account system (though paypal payment could be arranged via E-mail), . alternatively the games can be bought through the chrome web store or Apple Ap store to play on mobile devices. Also, lately some of these games are now available on the Steam platform, at least these can be found in the windows Steam store. Either way the games are very inexpensive, costing around 3 dollars (between one and two pounds in the Uk), and are well worth the price.
Choice of games is absolutely proof that a good game doesn't require complex mechanics, or detailed input systems, and can suffice just as well on well written descriptions and plotted choices, and are therefore very much recommended, particularly to people who have access to mobile devices such as Ipads, Iphones or google Smart phones as they are ideal to play on the go.
Steam Availability and notes
As mentioned earlier, some of the Choice of Games catalog is available through Valve's popular gaming service Steam, with the hope that the whole catalog will be available eventually. These games include some of their most popular, such as the very lengthy Zombie Exodus and also Tin Star, a weston, along with the Hero's Rise trilogy. Once a game is launched through the Steam client, it opens in a fully accessible window. However, Steam itself takes some setting up to be made usable with screen readers. It is our hope that eventually there will be a proper guide for screen reader users of Steam, but until then, please be patient and stay tuned, this page will be updated once the guide is available, with just a link to said guide, but it may take a while as we figure out what can, and can't be done, with Steam. Thank you in advance for your understanding and patience.
Community
The following users have added this game to their favorites: DakotahRickard, mata, MikeFont, djsenter, zakc93, FreddyMercury, grryfindore, Dark, Adina, darkmaster22, jasonstevanhill, Lovely lavender, dan_c, dotsonapage, tayo.bethel, ivanjc1, aaron
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Updates: entry 2 Feb 22 and description 2 Feb 22