Click the hourglass to skip a life stage or to see your current age. Click the graph bar to see where your stats stand, then and there. This tree is representative of all of the experiences you will have during each life stage. This is where the skills tree is presented. Once you've officially decided to be born (or you have been pushed out whether you like it or not), you'll enter infancy. I won't reveal which, because part of the fun is learning the game and how it works. While this may seem like it has no impact on the way your simulated life plays out, it does impact certain variables. Once you make it past the very-boring questions, it's time to dig into the real fun - being born! The game allows you to choose whether you want to come out fighting, come out peacefully, or stay in a while longer.

We all have to do difficult things in life that we don't enjoy, after all. But these quiz questions are what the game uses to put together your in-game personality, so don't skip them. This is easily the least favorite part of the game for me. When you start the game, you'll be presented with a set of quiz questions. Fair warning: the text and situations hilariously still refer to 1960s and 1970s experiences, so you may find yourself in high school deciding how to handle a friend who wants you to sell 'ludes.' There's also a bit of sexism present in the game it's mild, but very reflective of attitudes from when the game was first released. This particular online version is a port of the original game that was released for Apple II, Commodore 64, MS-DOS and Mac OS and was originally created by Activision in 1986. I can more easily form the story into something my own imagination can get hooked on, creating my own mental images in place of rendered wire frames covered in texture that I may or may not like.

Text-based games have always attracted me in some special way maybe it's because I am a writer myself.

Alter ego game play