Saw this post floating around, and it got me interested in how many video game board games actually exist out there, and if any of them are good.
Apparently there’s a ton of “Jinsei”-style games in Japan, modeled after the game of Life:
Yu Yu Jinsei / Victory Life:
"New Jensei Game"
Super Jensei Game
Also just, regular board games that use the regular-ass dull-as-dishwater non-spinner controller:
Dokapon Kingdom (Sorry there’s no non-youtube-screamer videos)
Others I’m aware of:
That controller is SICK.
Yes, amazing.
tsuushin taisen logic battle daisessen is a weird battleship game for dreamcast
maze heroes: meikyuu densetsu is a slightly rpg-ish thing for ps1 with great art
there’s translations for the first and third rune master games on msx, but i’ve never had the patience to play either of them.
there are many momotaro dentetsu games across various systems, though i think they’re mainly associated with the pc engine and snes.
i think along with the game of life, monopoly and e-suguroku are also big influences on japanese video board games
Itadaki Street is probably my favorite of these. It’s complicated Monopoly designed by the Dragon Quest guy, basically. The biggest difference between this and Monopoly is that there is a stock market, so you don’t have to own properties necessarily to win the game, and this very much benefits the thoughtful player (although it is still heavily based on randomness and is infuriatingly long):
The first one I ever played was Hyaku no Sekai no Monogatari: The Tales on a Watery Wilderness. It’s a Dragon Quest style RPG + Competitive Board Game. It got an English patch a long time ago and I played it based on novelty, but it was really fun to beat up the CPUs in these semi-randomly-generated scenarios. It’s pretty dang good, and also I think if you play as a girl and rescue the princess you get to be a lesbian??? I can’t remember.
Let me find what I wrote about Risk II on Mastodon.
Risk II on the PC was the ideal way of digitizing a board game, IMO. It had the classic turn based mode but added a “Simultaneous” mode where everyone played their turns in one go, and then everything resolved at once. It also had “weighted” dice that favored large armies with better rolls.
In other words, it kept the straight-up board game but also added a mode that could only be done digitally.
Very nice.
Those are all I can think of (that aren’t just, like…Monopoly on SNES) that I can think of off the top of my head.
I was just about to post about Fortune Street/Itadaki Street, the Wii version of which is literally the only video game my wife and I play together with any regularity.
It’s… so fun. Especially with four people (the comp players cheat too much).
I can’t convince my wife to play it, but honestly the games just last way too long anyway and she’d rage quit after 30 minutes.
The comps do cheat.
Yeah! Yeah! Six months ago I got really into “economics board game” video games, which also have evolutionary ties to the Mario Party / Sonic Shuffle party game genre. I kept wanting to ask here if anyone could tell me about the popular Japanese board games. When you’re a kid thumbing through roms, you just overlook the ones you can’t read with no action, but now I’m really wondering about that whole sphere. There were apparently dozens and nobody in the west ever chats about them. Can anyone help me?
The game that got me interested was Top Shop for the PS1. I love this game so much. It’s like Monopoly and Itadaki Street
The look is beautiful and cute, the tone is the perfect blend of 90s girly mall + monopoly party “you and your cute friends roleplay as filthy backstabbing capitalists in Square Land”. I had this HUGE game design document (~30 pages) of just bullshit that I wanted to put in my own Top Shop ripoff to make it even more complex and customizable.
Warcraft 3 had a weird array of somewhat popular user-created custom maps meant to emulate board games. I remember the Risk one being surprisingly fun, and rather divergent from the source material.
There was also a radically boring Monopoly adaptation:
JONES IN THE FAST LANE - Sierra, 1990
(WARNING/EDIT: I haven’t watched this video so I have no idea what the sound situation is)
For some reason, my friends and I were briefly obsessed with this Game of Life variant circa 2004, with a healthy amount of Monopoly injected.
It’s a blisteringly coarse distillation of middle class life into a series of monetary goals, rote life course markers, attainable status symbols, and struggling to make ends meet. YOU WANT TO WIN. But you will probably be stuck forever poor, thanks to a horrible combination of bad starting circumstances, luck, and unfortunate choices.
It’s a lot like life!
(A friend of mine and his wife were once going to make a Jones-like that was also going to introduce VN dating/eroge elements and it was going to be glorious.)
The sound is absolutely nightmarish. The player makes it a point to go into the options menu and max out the volume as soon as they are able.
This is awesome.
sonic shuffle was so bad
I found this while digging around in the IA for weird stuff to bring to the last meetup. Seeing the screenshot triggered a weird burst of nostalgia - I playing this one as a kid! I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing and made it my goal to collect as much gold as possible
b&
