Afterlife

Regarding the enormous success of Simcity, I always found it strange that it was imitated so little; compare on the other hand the enormous number of real time strategies and tycoon games, which are, of course, indebted to Simcity too. But directly in the wake of Will Wright's masterpiece there is only the City Builder Series; there is the less-than-professional Project Brasil; and there is the little known Afterlife by LucasArts.

In Afterlife, you build your own heaven and hell. First you have to place a gate in each, then you add rewards and punishments, respectively. They have to be connected by roads, which however are far less annoying than in similar games. Soon you will need karma stations for souls that get reborn, you need colleges to train angels and demons, and topias for them to live in, but take care not to train too many: while imported angels and demons are more expensive, idle ones tend to run amok and there's little you can do about it. But it's worthwhile to overtrain angels once just to here them cry Charge! Charge! Reload afterwards.

heaven and hell are actually different in more than the names and graphics of the buildings. You want heaven to be diverse, the rewards well mixed, while hell should be as undiverse as possible. Heaven should have a well-designed road system, if the souls have to walk too far you will get into severe problems later on. The roads in hell, on the other hand, should be as jammed as possible.

You have two advisors, the demon Jasper and the angel Aria, who put out some delightful he-said-she-said dialog. Of course, it's details like this, and the whacky rewards and punishments, that make up the fun of the game. I chuckled more about the ironic rewards than about the punishments, but hell is easier and more fun to build.

you may have to start over a few times before you get the grip of the game. I'm at my third try as I write this and probably will have to start over again soon: the road situation in heaven looks pretty hopeless. But on the whole Afterlife is a fun game that managed to divert my attention from Diablo II.

An Easter Egg

In some unused corner in hell, make a road square that surrounds an empty 7×7 area. Make the map face upwards, set the speed to Divine Intervention, and fill it like this:

The center tile, which appears gray because it is too far away from the road, should be blue (Humble/proud) too. As soon as you switch back to a higher speed, the following building will appear:

If you go to Microview, and then to the description, you will find the following text:

Well, I promised you a secret message, and here it is:

What I Believe
by Michael Stemmle

I believe, without reservation, that there is more to existence than the reality we are subjected to each and every day of our lives. I believe that we are more than the sum of our DNA and our memories, and that there is something immeasurable and immortal about us. I believe that when we die, this part of us (heck, let's just call it a soul) goes someplace else. Maybe it eventually comes back.

Why do I believe these things?

Because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. If we are all just happy accidents of nature, randomly bouncing our way through a random universe, then I want nothing to do with it. A life without purpose (no matter how nebulous, whimsical, or inscrutable) is equally useless.

Well, that's my opinion anyway.

Mike.

The page with the exclamation mark just says, This SECRET BUILDING is really cool.

Problems on the Mac

I found the following little gem in an attempted review on Whipassgaming (meanwhile gone). It's an excerpt of an email from a LucasArts support guy.

When Apple released the new CD-ROM/DVD driver (with OS 8.1, I believe), the version number of this driver was re-set to 1.0 or 1.01. Most of our Mac titles on CD (Rebel Assault 2, X-Wing, Mortimer, Afterlife, etc.) check for a CD-ROM driver of ver.5.1.1 or later, thus the new driver fails the check, and our games will recommend installation of the old 5.1.1 driver from our game CD. This can cause problems when installed on newer Macs with OS 8, yet some of our games will not even allow you to play the game unless Apple CD-ROM driver 5.1.1 or later is detected. We do not recommend installing this older CD-ROM driver from the game CD on your system. See if you can bypass the error that states that you should install the 5.1.1 driver, and see if the game will then play. Unfortunately, a few of our Mac titles will not allow you to bypass the incorrect CD-ROM driver version error, and some customers have made use of a work-around solution to this problem using a utility that you can search for on the Internet called ResEdit. Unfortunately, we cannot officially recommend this work-around (please contact Apple Computers for any questions that you may have regarding this work-around). This work-around involves changing the Mac CD extension version so that the System sees it as 5.1.1, and thus allows our games that require this software version to work with a Mac using the new CD/DVD ext. I would suggest that you first make a back-up copy of the Apple CD-ROM or CD/DVD driver file to a separate folder in case any problems occur with the edited file.

1. Open the Apple CD-ROM Driver or CD/DVD Driver using ResEdit.
2. Click on the VERS box.
3. Open up ID #1
4. In the first boxes, just after Version number, change the numbers from 1.0.1 (etc.) to 5.1.1.
5. Shut this window and quit ResEdit. Be sure to save changes.
6. Now run Afterlife, it should be fine.
7. After playing the game, make sure you re-edit this file to the original version number that was listed there.

The would-be reviewer decided not to try his luck with ResEdit, though he recommended others not to follow his example. I could find out, there was never a patch from LucasArts for this problem.

The LucasArts support guy was wrong in one detail, the new driver was introduced with OS 8.5, not 8.1. As Gona from Hungary (who also sent me the screenshot of the error message) writes me, 8.1 used CD-ROM driver version 5.4.2, and there are no problems at all.