The first strategy game I seriously played and loved was Dune II: Battle for Arrakis. Before that, I was absolutely not interested in this genre. I never found it particularly exciting to virtually push some combat units around on a map. But Dune 2 nevertheless cast its spell on me and has not let go of many of us to this day. A whole bunch of successors poured over the audience in the years that followed. However, these clones soon lost the appeal of the new. Perhaps I would have found these fresh ideas in other – less well-known – representatives of the genre back then. In search of such pearls, I enter the famous hexa fields of The Perfect General II.
Every time Sid Meier has a wild card to really do exactly what he wanted, he came back to Johann Sebastian Bach. In the early/mid 1990s, after the massive, consecutive hits Railroad Tycoon and Civilization, he turned his appreciation for this composer into an ultra-obscure music application on the ultra-obscure 3DO console (CPU Bach). Some years earlier, in the mid-80s, he had already built a strong name for himself with military simulations and wargames. Microprose's overall business relying strongly on Meier, he played his first joker and – in a daring departure from his established genres – made Pirates!.
Life simulation games have a special charm: On the one hand you go through your motions from day to day, on the other hand you want to escape it by having a go at the motions of someone else. So, you kind of ask yourself what it would be like to replace your daily routine with a more exciting one from somebody else. And that is the crucial point of the genre: Is the virtual life different enough to entertain you? Has it got enough distractions to offer, at least for a short while? For Space Jobs the answer is clearly no. Because although shows signs of some promising attempts, they get lost in a maze of advertisements, half-done ideas and programming bugs.
