Strategy
Theme Hospital: The Satire With a Sim Underneath
Every joke disease is a machine with a footprint and a throughput — the comedy is how Bullfrog taught you the simulation
Topic
Strategy
5 articles
Strategy
Dungeon Keeper: The Management Game With a Sneer
Bullfrog's 1997 inversion works because the joke is load-bearing — coerce a workforce and the game has to simulate the resentment
Strategy
Civilization II: The Loop That Stole Decades
Brian Reynolds's 1996 sequel is the most effective compulsion machine ever built, and the mechanism is just badly aligned timers
Strategy
Master of Orion 2: The 4X Peak
Simtex nested a design game inside a strategy game, and thirty years of successors have been trying to get the ship editor back
Strategy
X-COM: UFO Defense — The Tension Machine
Julian Gollop built a strategy game out of irreversible loss and things you cannot see, and nobody has improved on the arithmetic