Not For Broadcast

I think this game has a really interesting premise, but it keeps you too busy with sometimes annoying tasks to really appreciate it. I found the interference slider particularly annoying and would prefer if it could be disabled. Would be a big QOL improvement for this game IMO. It seems to generally reward clicking back and forth between views and clicking events on and off at the right time. I did flunk the second broadcast at the end and I'm not really sure why. (Viewers kept dropping even though I thought I had it on the correct view.) To really appreciate what's going on, you have to go back and watch everything again after the broadcast, but there's no fast forward button to get to the point that you want to see that I could find. The humour is particular. Quite silly in places, sort of along the lines of "not the 9'o'clock news" if anyone remembers that program. If it was less busy and more focused on manipulating the audience by choosing views and what to show (which I thought was more what it was going to be) I think I would have liked it, but having to manually manage every single transition and interference took the fun out it. (I've never enjoyed micromanaging sims.) If you can deal with micromanaging and don't mind this sort of humour you may like this game though.

Well here we are, I quite enjoyed this one. It really feels like work and it’s stressful sometimes. Just like I would imagine a real broadcasting job would be! The developer certainly took care of some of these issues with different and customizable difficulty settings. For example, I really don’t enjoy the interference stuff, so I just disable it. So that really helps, as do the keyboard controls (which take some time to get used to, unfortunately, especially for the swearing censor mechanic). The topics of the game are satirical and black humored. Sometimes it’s a bit on the nose and any underlying commentary gets shoved in your face, and hard. Depending on where you are on a political scale, you may find the social commentary a bit difficult. But the good thing is, it’s so hilariously over the top, that it can be adapted to the opposite spectrum of politics, too. Just need to change some words and left becomes right with the same shock value. It really doesn’t matter in the end, I guess. Hope that makes sense? Anyways, the camp acting is great. I really enjoy the two anchors and the two PMs, supporting Kost is also very good (the first phone calls for example are great!). It’s just a really fun game, if you don’t take it too seriously and don’t mind being offended every now and then. The mechanics take a few moments to get used to, but then they are becoming second nature. If all else fails, you can watch the hilarious clips in the Archive and see what shenanigans happened while you were busy twiddling those screen controls.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game despite it looking-- and sometimes outright playing like-- a job. Some bits are particularly frustrating, I don't really understand why you need to fiddle around with random controls when an alarm goes off when the core appeal of this game is the silly FMVs you can flip through, but I guess that does make you feel a bit more like an active participant. I can't seem to find out where your choices actually matter in this game which is good, but it also makes me wonder how the game decides which of the fourteen endings you get. The story really does hammer you over the head with its political commentary at times, but I don't think you need to be subtle to make a point. The campy acting is fun, and I found Jeremy Donaldson to be a rather charming character. Overall, the game is fun, and is a good satire on our current political climate.

I have a FMV addiction these past two years. I bought this, and I liked the humour, and it's one of the better FMV games you can play. But here's what I didn't like. If you want to just edit the news in a funny manner, you can do this, but the game throws many distractions at you, and so rather than just watching the FMV you spend more time fighting creatures, stopping lightning strikes and tuning the loss of signal. The great part is, that doesn't matter as after the broadcast is over you can watch the result of your work - you can watch the broadcast in full as YOU sent it out. The other part of the game which is what I found more frustrating, is the game would crash a lot on me, so I'd have to start the current broadcast all over again. And when this happened to me back to back, I just gave up on this game and haven't gone back. I do want to check it out again, but I'd need to know those hard CTD's have been fixed.