Skip to main content

Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator review – ghoulish satire of human greed

Xbox One, Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows, PC; Strange Scaffold
Our compulsion for profit is smartly skewered by this simple game set in a trading-market where the currency is body parts

It’s been a bumper year for the slavering ghouls that run some of the games industry’s biggest publishers, who have found fresh ways to extract value from players through NFTs and cryptocurrency while producing little of value. Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, with its economy of dripping kidneys and fresh-plucked nerve clusters, feels downright wholesome by comparison, a truly rustic post-capitalist digital hellscape.

It’s a premise as old as time: buy low, sell eyes. And spleens. More of a frantic clicker-game than a strategy sim, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is only slightly more complex than a screensaver, though still chemically compulsive. Days are split between navigating a fleshy stock market, and trying to outbid cyborgs and dogs with names like Chad Shakespeare on the freshest human cuts. Think eBay as overseen by Harlan Ellison’s Allied Mastercomputer. You accept orders, wait for the organs to show up, grab them before a rival trader does and try to make a profit. As you progress, your customers get fussier. Organs are graded like trading cards, or Destiny loot drops. Where does a mythic lung come from, anyway? No time to think about it. The market wants what it wants.

Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is out now; £15

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mpv5hK
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more