SimCinema XL

One of the ancient abandonware games sitting on my hard-drive is Sim Cinema. (The link is for the Mac Version. I'll be honest, I don't know if it ever came out for Windows.) Lately, I've been thinking about the kind of things I'd add if I was developing the game. For no real reason, I've come to think of this expanded and largely fantastical game as "Sim Cinema XL". When you get right down to it, I see it as a series of statistics- say, for example, you take Brad Pitt's "Drama" stat and a random number determines whether he's made a Critical Sucess ("Fight Club"), Sucess, Failure or Critical Failure ("Alexander"). Of course, the final outcome is also determined by the stats of the director, special effects budget, etc. Being in a film gives an actor a level-up in that genre, and maybe another skill point in some other field. You can choose script qualities like "idiosyncratic" which boosts it's chance to score "influential" status but runs the risk of being slated as "self-indulgent'. I even imagined a seasonal curve (Summer gives a +3 bonus on Mass Appeal saving rolls for Action films, maybe).

I think I may be suffering D&D envy. (Incidentally, I question the realism of that animation on the sole basis that it depicts a woman playing. Joking, I joke, of course.) This is a genre of entertainment I've never entered into, and in a way I wish I had. Perhaps it's my marginal assimilation into Gamer culture, but in some ridiculous fashion I feel as if I've missed out on some kind of childhood rite. I seem to remember from several lifetimes ago, a number of my friends playing Warhammer. Maybe one day we could get together for a campaign. Or maybe that's a pipe-dream.

The other day I went online to discover, you know, if I were looking (not to say that I am) how much a set of polyhedral dice would set me back. I can hear the voice of Cole Richards, and he's saying "Buy them. Buy them, and your journey to the dark side will be complete".