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Number of Reviews: 6
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3 people found the following review helpful:
A sweeping sci-fi tale with emotional resonance, October 18, 2022by ccpost (Greensboro, North Carolina) I absolutely love this game. I've been exploring more and more Choice of Games as I really like their balance of game-like elements (navigating characters through difficult situations to 'unlock' achievements and build up stats) and rich storytelling. Choice of Robots is a perfect example of an incredibly engaging story that you feel like you're playing through and shaping with your choices.
That story, of a disgruntled graduate student who invents a sentient robot and proceeds to alter the world forever, is finely crafted. Gold presents a thought-provoking sci-fi parable in which the reader gets to play out various scenarios (grand but plausible, in the way of a good sci-fi novel) starting from the premise of the invention of a truly sentient robot. The player can seek fame, fortune, power, etc. but can also be more insular and develop the robot as a thing of beauty and a companion. Even a single playthrough of the game presents a sweeping narrative that spans decades and sees seismic transformations in global society. The game carries the player through many poignant and troubling situations that ask us to consider the implications of many trajectories that we're currently on in society. The fact that this is but one branch of a many-branched story adds to the grandeur. Just scrolling through the achievements gives the player a sense of the many, many different possibilities to explore.
I died relatively early on in my first play through -- (Spoiler - click to show)Tammy got me!. The risk of death was surprising as all the other Choice of Games that I've played have not featured those dead ends, or at least not that I've found. But I actually appreciated the risk that that introduced -- and the subsequent gravity this lent to my choices as I played through the game a second time. For the titles that Choice of Games publishes, there may be some company style guidelines that prohibit too many dead ends like this, but I'd be interested to see more ChoiceScript games explore more game-like structures that have dead ends or less optimal game ending states.
The non-player characters also seem well developed, though I didn't choose to invest much in personal relationships -- aside from remembering to call my Mom every so often! Rather, I focused more on the relationship with the robot, as this was the most intriguing to delve into, given the nature and theme of the game. The game does reward this probing of the inventor-robot relationship and presents it in full complexity and complication. Do you position yourself as a godlike creator, the inventor of a tool (or weapon), an artist, a parent, a friend? All of these shades and nuances are explored in the game, and I imagine that an understanding of this relationship would be deepened even further on replays.
Overall, this game is a wonderful expression of the possibilities of choice-based interactive fiction. The story is foregrounded -- and players are rewarded for engaging with the story at the level of narrative, structure, and style -- but this story is driven by gameplay.
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
A masterclass in science fiction, April 27, 2021Choice of Robots is an excellent, highly replayable SF story about the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on modern society. It's so good that I would buy it again twice over if I could.
At its heart, science fiction is about "what if" questions: what if you could travel back in time? What if androids were indistinguishable from humans? The best SF stories take an intriguing "what if" question and spin it into a gripping vision of a world that could be. The genius of Choice of Robots is that it lets you ask the "what if" question yourself -- through your actions and choices, you write the SF prompt that you find most personally appealing, and the game presents you with the future defined by your choices. The result is a riveting story structure that makes perfect sense for a science-fiction CYOA, full of player agency, surprises, and replayability.
The prose and narrative design of Choice of Robots are consistently excellent. Character and story arcs are vividly elaborated in sharp, elegant paragraphs. The game clearly foreshadows decision points and the results of your choices, resulting in a game that feels responsive and fair. And all the way through the game, those choices are remembered and referenced with staggering fidelity: your robot may develop a lifelong love of computer games or TV programming, depending on the corpus you train it with in the very first chapter.
An abundance of science fiction, IF, and computer science references betray the author's dedication and passion for his work. Turn-of-the-millennium American culture is lovingly illustrated, explored, and lampooned. Perhaps most importantly, the philosophical themes of the work are imbued in every chapter -- the ethics of artificial life, the balance between inquiry and humanity -- resulting in a cohesive authorial voice that resonates from every page.
But enough gushing. The point is that Choice of Robots is a damn good work, worthy of its pedestal in the IF canon; in my opinion, it could even be ranked among the all-time science fiction classics. This is a bona fide interactive fiction masterpiece: thoughtful, funny, heartwarming, solemn, and yet full of joy.
5/5 game, would conquer Alaska with killer robots again.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
A must for any serious AGI developer or Roboticist. , March 12, 2017It helped me discover what I valued most in regards to AGI development and my dreams for the future of robot-human interaction. I’d recommend it to anyone serious about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or Robots.
Play
I found the first play through to be the most genuine and enjoyable. My robots ended up with very high autonomy and empathy. I ended up replacing my arm with a robotic prosthetic, and getting a chip in my head, as well as marrying a robot, who said we would go to the stars together.
I played it several other times to get to various other story-archs I was interested in, such as the business, robo cult, hive mind and nation founding ones. I found them to be mildly informative, but most of all it was nice to be faced with these choices, make them and thus have a better idea of what combination of things I truly want for myself.
I found I didn’t like playing “fake” as in making uncharacteristic choices to maximize certain attributes, but found that I could play myself, just keep an eye on the score, and if all the attributes are over 20 by mid game then you’ll have maximum choice with what to do.
Bodies
The host bodies of the robots were rather minimal, though granted most of the plot is really about you, and discovering who you are, rather than gaining any insights about the robots.
One particularly incredulous part was where in 2019, a phone is used for the robots brain. I imagine that perhaps Dr. Gold was under the impression that Siri is an AI that lives in your iPhone/iPad, but that is a common misconception, as actually Siri lives in Apple’s cloud, and sends your voice there, and responses from there. The “Siri” on your phone is little more than a voice message forwarding program.
In reality a phone may be realistic in the 2030’s, as even in the 2020’s when we’re first scheduled to achieve consumer grade human-level computer hardware it will still be workstation/desktop size.
Right now (2017) only large corporations can afford human-level computer hardware, it can take for example contemporary 900 GPU’s to do the work of a Deep Learning computer programmer.
Storyline-Archs
In general I’m happy with the selection of archs available, covers just about every readily apparent eventuality.
Though admittedly I had to play through it maybe 5 or 6 times before getting to all the parts I wanted.
Conclusion
All in all, it’s probably one of the best books/games I’ve ever played in my whole life, and well worth the money.
While it claims to be 300,000 words, I think it depends on how it is counted. A single play through reads like a novella 4-5 hours, can be completed in an evening or two.
Can play the first two chapters for free, the whole game is the cost of a few USB cables ($5).
2 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
Waaaah - robots!, May 1, 2016I have to stop reviewing the titles I love! Longer titles like this are more labours of love than commercial ventures and if we want to see more of them from Kevin Gold - who writes a seamless, broad and >original< narrative in Robots
- we need to read and review in their support.
In choice of robots I ended up helping humanity better itself with my robot creation made out of, yes . . . wood.
Why oh why I didn't see eye to eye with the department of Defence I'm not quite sure. . .
; )
5 of
5 people found the following review helpful:
Long, highly replayable game. Spend a lifetime working with robots., February 3, 2016Choice of Robots is a game that has received high accolades, such as an XYZZY nomination for Best Game, and very favorable reviews from the general video game community.
I loved it. A very long game, perhaps of novella or screenplay length, and that is just in one playthrough. You can take wildly different paths, from prison to riches to love to all sorts of things. You keep track of 10 relationships, 4 robot stats, personal stats and political stats.
You are a young robot researcher, developing robot technology, and you have the chance to guide the development of robots toward autonomy, acting like humans, giant tank missiles, or advanced surgeons.
The gameplay can either be free-flowing, answering each question as it comes, or you can develop intricate plans to minimax your characters stats.
Well worth the money; this was the first commercial game that I bought since I purchased the complete Infocom collection.
This is just as good as Creatures Such As We and Choice of the Dragon, but longer. The only hiccups I found were inconsistent branches; when someone I married quit my company, the game said I wouldn't see them for a long time, for instance, without mentioning our relationship.
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Cool story with lots of content and replayability, September 21, 2015"Choice of Robots" is among the best-known (and most successful) games in the Choice of Games brand. It's the first CoG game I've played, and this is a very good starting point for whoever wants to check them out: it is a really good game that everyone loved.
You are cast as a grad student in Stanford working on a new robot, and you get to customise your robot and its education, which will orient the robot's stats (Military, Autonomy, Empathy, Grace), as well as yours (Fame, Wealth). Those stats orient the narrative in a rather explicit way: the choices you are presented with are the same (I think), but some of them will result in failure because a stat is too small, or some will not be selectable because a corresponding stat needs to be high enough. In particular, there's a big choice near the end that seems to appear in every playthrough, that determines which of 4 different chapters you will play (and some of them cannot be selected if some stats aren't high enough); structurally, this kind of acts as a funnel towards the endings, reducing the number of possibilities to get a more focused finale, which is nice. In the chapters that come before, there are a lot of events that can happen rather independently, depending on choices you've made and the relationships you formed with people, and it's a lot of fun to try to explore all of them (the number of combinations seem to be huge!); whereas the finale seems to have less important variation and opportunities to change what happens: the game still takes into account, say, your romantic option, but I found it was rather interchangeable (for instance, in my first and third playthrough, I ended up married to a human or to a robot, but their reactions and dialogues were the same, and didn't seem to depend on the personality of the mate very much). Also re:interchangeability, I 'discovered' my partner's secret twice ((Spoiler - click to show)we discovered Elly was Chinese when we got married, and then she told me she had just found out recently when we both got arrested), which made it feel like the game hadn't planned for that and that my partner really was supposed to be interchangeable.
For my first playthrough, I played as truthfully as I could, choosing things that made me happy and corresponded to my personality; I was happy with the options that were presented to me and where I ended up, even though (Spoiler - click to show)I ended up having a second robot that wanted to be romantically involved with me, when I didn't want to, which was hard to navigate (but hey, that's how life is sometimes -- and maybe I shouldn't have chosen what I chose at the 'funnel choice'). I was really heartbroken at the ending, but that was OK: it was really well written and I didn't feel robbed, and it still felt satisfying. It felt like "my story" -- which is great!
However, I thought that the game was fast-forwarding through some interesting parts, including my main relationship, which is a shame. I kept thinking that we were spending so much time talking about robots and work that my partner was going to leave me, but out of the blue the game skipped to a scene where we got engaged and got married. In that sense, what followed the 'funnel' choice (I had the (Spoiler - click to show)Empathy route I think) was more satisfying, as it was dealing with human-human and human-robot relationships in depth; I just didn't like that, before that, I was trying to build a relationship but the game didn't really spend much time talking about it, which felt like I was failing at building the relationship. I have no idea if it's like that in other CoG games, but I heard the style was to present you with big important choices; but I certainly wouldn't mind having more details put into relationships (more scenes, partners aren't interchangeable, etc) instead of fast-forwarding it a bit.
I came back on my third playthrough to this route / style of choices to see what changed and what didn't, when my second playthrough was a much more aggressive character. That second playthrough in particular made me notice something else (that in retrospect was also present my other playthroughs), that sometimes choices failed without really any hint that they might fail. So, you have a list of choices, and you can kinda guess what could happen, but then something else happens and it turns out it wasn't a good choice. I don't know if that's really a bad thing, I guess; certainly there are choices in life that you make that turn out to be bad ones, and you couldn't have prevented it, and it sucks and you have to deal with it. But in a game, it kinda feels to me like it was pulling the rug from under me; I was interested in the consequences of the actions, but turns out that no, the game isn't going to go this way, and by the way you lose Wealth. (Such choices that come to mind: (Spoiler - click to show)letting kids play with your robot, waiting for a clearance to start selling robots to the US Air Force, attacking Juneau.) Just to clarify, I'm OK with actions having negative consequences for the player, I'm just not really thrilled with the prospect of having random events blocking my way; I'd much rather have the game lay out the situation, give me a choice, then explore the consequences, negative or positive, without pulling something from its sleeve at the last second.
The writing is good, and the drama is well-managed, so that each playthrough feels like an exciting or interesting story. I also really liked that the world that is described is in the near future, and is very tangibly linked to our world; a lot of the times, I felt like I recognized the pattern from the present world that was brought up and explored in a section of the game, which made it feel very possible and grounded in reality. It's really not that far-fetched, in terms of SF, and I really liked it (see above: the game organically explores a situation we both know). There are also a few jokes in the game, most of them of the geeky kind (I loved the IF references), although at times they didn't really feel appropriate (there's a Konami Code reference at an otherwise pretty dramatic moment). Your mileage may vary. Also, the prose was mostly very good technically speaking: apart from a missing period once, I didn't really notice anything in 3 playthroughs.
To sum up, "Choice of Robots" feels very satisfying: the story is great, with lots of different possibilities each exploring different thematics; the world that's described is very interesting and grounded in reality, which makes it interesting even if you're not into SF. My only regrets are that the game fast-forwards a bit through the early relationships, and that some choices are unexpectedly bad. I'll definitely keep playing it and try to get as many achievements as I can, and I'll also probably check out other CoG games!
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