Take your mind off the election...

October 28, 2004 10:12 AM

Princess Maker 2 - Stressed out from current events? I doubt the game is as much fun to play as it is to be bewildered by, but either might help. "...is basically a perverse sports management simulation where your entire team consists of a single ten year old girl that you have to raise to adulthood. Much like any decent sports manager game you have to keep track of a nearly overwhelming number of statistics that fluctuate based on training. In Princess Maker 2 these run the gamut from the mundane like "strength" and "charisma", to the droll like "cooking" and "conversation", to the bizarre like "sin" and "temper". "
posted by soulhuntre (13 comments total)

It kind of makes having a RealDoll seem kind of normal.
posted by soulhuntre at 10:18 AM on October 28, 2004

Princess Maker is excellent fun.
posted by ZippityBuddha at 10:21 AM on October 28, 2004

The one time I played it through, my daughter was a combat cuisinart, but she turned out not to have much in the way of morals (I wasn't that enthused about sending her to church), so she was considered a disappointment for all her vast combat prowess.

But hey, she kicked a god's ass.
posted by ursus_comiter at 11:44 AM on October 28, 2004

When you go the way of barmaid and loose morals, she really hates your guts in the end while she talks about finding tricks.

Then there was the time she was sooooo sensitive she became a painter.

The inn-keeper's wife, that was another one.

I never did manage to make her a princess....
posted by linux at 11:56 AM on October 28, 2004

I managed princess on second try. On first try, she ended up married to the inn keeper and having about a zillion babies.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:09 PM on October 28, 2004

This is excellent news, I'm getting this for my daughters, should they manage to raise their "daughter" to princess-hood, my job as a parent is done! "Whatvere you think is right, honey."
posted by Keith Talent at 12:27 PM on October 28, 2004

this is a good game. A new flavor of fun.

it's a shame something as original as this could never be made in america. The game industry is so set in its ways here, so genre-bound. If you want to make money, that is. And most publishers won't even finance a game unless they expect to make gobs of money.

Oddly, this isn't really an original game in Japan, where it's from. There's a well-established genre of dating-sim games there, as well as management games. Anything you can imagine managing, there's a game for it.
posted by Miles Long at 12:37 PM on October 28, 2004

huh. the folks at HOTU seem to love it.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:50 PM on October 28, 2004

Yeah the Princess Maker series really helped get Gainax out of the hole after Wings of Homneamise flopped, we might not have had Evangelion if it wasn't for this series.

Anyway, it's a neat game. Most games now seem to be 15-20 hours to complete with 2 or 3 endings, but this game lasts 4-6 hours with a hundred different (though unspectacular) endings.

it's a shame something as original as this could never be made in america.

I don't know, The Sims deals with a lot of the same subject matter and is sort of a similar genre (though publishers were really reluctant about the game at first). And it's strange how the "dating simulation" is starting to creep into the West with games like San Andreas, Fable and Leisure Suit Larry.
posted by bobo123 at 1:36 PM on October 28, 2004

I remember that game! It was pretty neat. There was apparently also a Princess Maker 3, but it was only released in Japan.
posted by Asparagirl at 3:25 PM on October 28, 2004

A friend of mine played this game like it was crack in middle school. I think I still have a copy kicking around, but I never did play it. Time for an experiment!

bobo123: Isn't the original Leisure Suit Larry game really old? I remember hearing references back when MSDOS was my primary operating system, but I could be wrong.
posted by mote at 8:07 PM on October 28, 2004

The original Leisure Suit Larry is pretty old (mid 1980s), mote, but I think bobo123 is talking about the new spiritually unrelated Xbox version.

Fun trivia bit: Al Lowe, creator of the adult-oriented Leisure Suit Larry series, also made a few Disney childrens games, which you can actually download off his site.
posted by Darke at 8:56 PM on October 28, 2004

Isn't the original Leisure Suit Larry game really old? I remember hearing references back when MSDOS was my primary operating system, but I could be wrong.

It's descended from Sierra On-Line's "Softporn Adventure" for the Apple II. The first game actually called Leisure Suit Larry ("In The Land of the Lounge Lizards," 1987) follows basically the same plot as "Softporn" and was initially released for both Apple II and MS-DOS.
posted by kindall at 11:11 PM on October 28, 2004