Graphics

The graphics are perhaps the one thing they did well. This virtual board is far more colorful and decorated than the classic board, and the look conveys a sense of fun, even when the actual game isn't delivering. For once, the family members in your car resemble actual people (albeit with freakishly huge heads) rather than colored pegs. Actually, this part is kinda disturbing, as the kids look like little clones of the adult characters. Worse yet, the fact that the game handles everything means you can't pull all those stunts I mentioned above. Dammit, how can I play on a board that deprives men of their right to ram their archenemies off the road or hand them a lesbian peg when they're getting married?

Meanwhile, many of the spaces have brief but cute animations, like your house getting crushed and then popping back up on the "Tree falls on house, pay $15,000" space. Enjoyable. The cars drive across the board in a first-person perspective (making the various board decorations seem even more numerous), and while you'll quickly hit a key to skip past that because you only care about what space you landed on, it's still smooth.

Not that it matters - a game can't thrive on good visual design alone - but still.

Sound

The opening music has a party feel to it - unfortunately, the lame, clean-cut kinds of parties you see in sanitized movies, not drunken orgies. It's very annoying. Further emphasizing this is the voice acting. You've got a narrator who announces who's up and what space you landed on, but other than sounding overexcited, he has a good voice. Sadly, he's not the only voice. You've also got other voices reading the lame panel jokes that pop up on many spaces, and most of them are annoying. You'll be turning it all off to listen to mp3s in short order.

Smoothness

I didn't have any crashes while running this...then again, I tired of it quickly, and perhaps didn't give it enough chances to be catastrophically unstable. It has math problems, though. In the beginning, you must choose to go down either the Career path (free) or the College path (-$40,000). You begin with $10,000, and if you choose college, you end up with a total of -$40,000. What the hell?

Gameplay

Ah, the most important part. The real problem here is that The Game Of Life bears only a passing resemblance to the board game, changing numerous things. This is really inexcusable. Almost every adaptation of frigging Monopoly I've ever seen is faithful to the original game...and the rules of Life are much simpler. How hard would it have been to get it right?

The colors of the spaces aren't even the same. You may think that wouldn't be a big deal, but imagine playing Monopoly with Boardwalk and Park Place as lavender colored properties. Go on, picture it. Just wouldn't feel right, would it? Then again, the wrong colors are hardly worth noticing against the extraneous bullshit they've added to the gameplay. Forget lavender properties: imagine a Monopoly where, instead of buying properties or paying rent on most spaces, you get or lose "Tycoon Points" or something.

Of course, even that might've been excusable, but for two things. In the beginning, you can select between the "Enhanced Game" and the "Classic Board Game", but - adding insult to injury - the Classic game still has most of the extra garbage rules! Second (and worse), little of it adds anything to the game.

There are only three new elements worth anything. The first is how players get occupations. In the original game, it was kind of lame, depending entirely on what space you landed on. This computer version offers some choice - it's only entirely random if you go down the Career path. If you go down College, you get to pick from three random choices. Hey, better than nothing.

This ties into the second good thing. In the original game, fines and other losses were just paid to the bank. Here, however, the loss spaces are tied to one occupation or another - for example, a hospital bill space would be Doctor-related, while paying for a movie premier would be Superstar. If another player has that occupation, your payment goes to them instead. Actually, the old "Sue for revenge" spaces have been thrown out, too - instead, when you land directly on Payday, you get to collect your salary from a player of your choice. As everyone knows, trash-talking and hostility are the greatest part of the board game experience, so it's nice to have things like this to keep the ill will going between players.

Lastly, we have buying a house. In the original game, you just paid money and were done with it. This version gives you a choice of various types of homes (mobile home, country cottage, Tudor, beach house, and so forth), then charges you a random amount of money. The random price range is determined by the house, so your odds of being set back a zillion bucks are a bit higher with a Victorian home than a mobile. Much more colorful, even if I'm not sure why anyone would choose the most expensive ones.

If all the programmers' liberties had been this thoughtful (and with the option to turn them off), this game might yet have been worth something.

Unfortunately, most of the board spaces aren't even from the original game. Instead of gaining or losing money, giving birth, losing a turn, buying insurance, or other such classic elements, most spaces in the "Classic Board Game" hand out Life Tiles that are redeemed for money at the end of the game. This would be tolerable, except that each and every one of these damn spaces has a random and completely annoying one-panel joke.

For example, the "Visit in-laws" space might show a picture of someone in front of two bikers, with the caption "You mean my in-laws are outlaws?" Yeah, that's good...I only saw that joke in Disney's furry adaptation of Robin Hood 25 years before this game came out, and I doubt many were laughing then, either. Then there's the "Don't drink and drive" space (say what? Does this represent the part of my life where I'm not drinking and driving? Hey, if it'll get me to crash and exit this game sooner, get a keg and hook it to my veins!). That one gave me a picture of Einstein in a car, with the caption "But remember to think and drive!" Then there are some of the Payday ones: a bum finding change on the ground and proclaiming something like "It must be my payday", and a woman saying "Now I can pay off last month's bills".

I'll admit, grudgingly, that I've seen less amusing crap in newspaper comics, but I think they involved Christian cavemen or something ultra-lame like that. They still caused me to resent much of the time I spent playing.

As bad as that is, though, the "Enhanced Game" version is perhaps worse. The panel joke spaces are still there, but the Life Tiles are thrown out, and instead you have to play random minigames. Most of these are variants of memory games (where you have to select two identical items from a grid of covered items), but a couple are crane drop games that you sometimes see in arcades, where a ball falls between spinners and you hope it goes to the right spot. Players can win money from all these, but the novelty value wears down fast, as they're not that much fun, rarely make much of a difference, and stretch out everyone's turn even longer. It would have been way cooler to have minigames like seeing how many crappy domestic beers your family's dad could down before passing out during the Superbowl, or the trophy wife trying to stay in good enough shape to keep the affairs with nubile and willing 20 year olds to a minimum, or one of the slacker sons trying to keep his pot stash where no one will stumble across it.

Lastly, there is the Internet play option. I admit I didn't bother with this. I can see enjoying multiplayer on this one if there are other people in the room with you, but playing it with random strangers on the internet - when I can't even laugh in their faces - didn't appeal to me.

Conclusion

This game isn't worthless as a distraction, but it isn't faithful to the original board game, and it has way too many annoying, humorless elements for a solid recommendation.

Recommended:
No