crimelife

the epitome of what i didn't want from video games, of what i seeked to avoid\n\nless what it actually was, but what it represented, what i thought of it at the time\n\n<<return>>

but it's pointless to think about\n\nwhen i played crimelife 2, i didn't feel any of that\n\nsomehow, the threat had dissipated\n\ni saw it all for what it really was\n\n[[just a toy]]

pretty pathetic, right?\n\nhe sensed it too. so he egged me on\n\nit was funny\n\ni mean, you know how little boys are\n\nhe knew i was a chickenshit\nso he laughed\nrunning over people and shooting them\ntrying to get a rise out of me\n\nwatching me squirm in my seat\n\nit's [[funny]] to think about now\n\nsuch a stupid thing to feel upset about!\n\nsomething only a little boy could feel

"[[Crimelife 2]] is a full 3d GTA [[clone]] with [[advanced graphics]] and phisics[sic]. In this beta version you can [[freeroam]] around the new huge city. [[Shoot people]] and explode vehicles with 7 weapons including uzi, shotguns, [[rocketlunchers]][sic] and more. Purchase more weapons from [[Weapon-Nation]] shop\nDrive a [[car]] from 16 available all diferent in appearance and interior. Enter a [[building]] to explore the rich content and many, many other things.\nPlease report any bugs or things that you [[don't like]] in the game."\n<<silently>><<set $choice = random(9)>><</silently>>\n<span class="randoms">[img["images/randos/" + $choice + ".png"]]\n</span>

\n[img[images/movie2.png]]\n\n[img[images/movie3.png]]\n\nyeah it's frogger. lol\n\n[img[images/movie4.png]]\n\nsomething special about seeing the game maker default scoreboard here. like sure, no point reinventing the wheel, but in a game as customized as this it's cute seeing a feature that a 7 year old can also add to their game using drag and drop. just a neat quirk of the engine\n\n[img[images/score.png]]\n\n<<return>>

at the time i thought his ability to enjoy a game like this meant he was just much more of a man than me\n\ni was right, but for the wrong reasons\nthe way little kids act out gender was too complicated for me to grasp\n\nwhat actually made him a man was showing me the game, not playing it\n\nbeing a man at that age means having discomfort set on you, and being tricked into thinking you could reclaim your dignity by performing the same discomfort on others\n\nsome never even grow out of it\n\n[[return|perplexed]]

i wonder\n\nhad it only been a few years later\n\nmaybe our roles would have been reversed\n\n\n[[return|perplexed]]

there's nothing out in the ocean... no island to go to or anything\n\n\nwhy drive around the border of the map - where nothing interesting exists beyond a .jpeg of a water texture that i can't even get to load in WINE properly?\n\nthere's no obvious point to it except that it exists, it's another "cool" vehicle, gta has a boat, etc etc\n\n[img[images/boat.png]]\n\n\n<<return>>

a game\n\n\n\nwhatever hideous quality i saw in the original\nwas gone\n\n\nsomething was [[lost]] in the copy

"advanced graphics" isn't exactly hyperbole. while game maker has some support for 3d, it's not easy to actually use in comparison to its 2d capabilities\nnobody wants to mess with vertex buffers or remaking collision and shit\n\nyou saw 3d games on the site, of course. but an open world gta clone is a bit of a larger undertaking\n\n<<return>>

[[i'm really glad i'm not little anymore]]

no pitiful play-acting as cops and robbers\n\ninstead\n\nvisions of another place\n\nblood and viscera and something [[stinking]]

maybe it was just the result of being a bit sheltered\n\ni did grow out of it eventually\n\nthere was a whole world of violence out there waiting for me\n\nbut it was [[different]]\n\nit made everything else seem pedestrian\n\n

[[or a boy]]

it's full of the creator's own artwork, for you to enjoy\n\n[img[images/art1.png]]\n\nnot much else to say. maybe the most endearing part of crimelife 2\n\n[img[images/art2.png]]\n\nwow!!! spiderman!!!!\n\n[img[images/art3.png]]\n\n<<return>>

at some point, it was suggested we should play a video game\n\n\n\n\n\n\nor to be more accurate- he would [[play]] while i would watch\n\n\nyeah

$('#style-ui-bar,#ui-bar').remove();

by the time you can afford a weapon and found the shop you've probably already looted the good ones off dead cops\n\nor cheated and spawned them in\n\nbut its here i guess. if you need it\n\n[img[images/weapon.png]]\n\n\n<<return>>

games are sent to this context/realm of hell to be played by streamers for "kicks", and listed on sites like "the crappy games wiki". the sorts of commentary you see given to crimelife 2 by these people makes the avgn seem like a well adjusted guy\n\nseems pretty joyless to make fun of something made in 2007 by a teenager but what do i know\n\n<<return>>

strangely enough this place is in the unfinished hell desert and yet is the closest in terms of feeling like a real space\n\n[img[images/bowl1.png]]\n\nthere are actual people here, for one\n\nyou can pay 50 dollars to play bowling. if you get a strike or a spare you can win some money\n\n[img[images/bowl2.png]]\n\nthat's about it\n\n<<return>>

why did i feel this way?\n\neven though i didn't like violent things for the most part... there were still exceptions\n\nit bothered me, that i couldn't pinpoint why this in particular had freaked me out...\n\nwas it just the realism? was seeing this in 3d, with detailed graphics enough to make it much worse?\n\neven besides games, i had seen worse things on tv\n\nit [[perplexed]] me

crime life crime wave

in this context, there is a crimelife 2 on sites like softonic or softpedia or download-free-game-dot-com or whatever the fuck... you know, those download sites nobody has used in like 15 years... the game sitting there for an audience of no one and inevitably bundled with some kind of virus or crypto miner. "whoa? gta?? for free??" some hapless 11-year old says, as they click on the link they found through a mistaken google search and instantly cause their computer to explode\n\n<<return>>

body.normal {\n\tbackground-image: url("images/bg.png");\n\tbackground-repeat: repeat;\n}\n\nbody.fade1 {\n\tbackground-image: url("images/bg1.png");\n\tbackground-repeat: repeat;\n\tbackground-color: black;\n}\n\nbody.fade2 {\n\tbackground-image: url("images/bg2.png");\n\tbackground-repeat: repeat;\n\tbackground-color: black;\n}\n\nbody.fade3 {\n\tbackground-image: url("images/bg3.png");\n\tbackground-repeat: repeat;\n\tbackground-color: black;\n}\n\nbody.fade4 {\n\tbackground-image: url("images/bg4.png");\n\tbackground-repeat: repeat;\n\tbackground-color: black;\n}\n\nbody.fade5 {\n\tbackground-color: black;\n}\n\nimg {\n\tdisplay: block;\n\tmargin-left: auto;\n\tmargin-right: auto;\n max-width: 80%;\n height: auto;\n width: auto\s9; /* ie8 */\n}\n\nspan.randoms > img {\n\tdisplay: block;\n\tmargin-left: auto;\n\tmargin-right: auto;\n}\n\n#passages {\n\tdisplay: table;\n\tcolor:white;\n\tbackground-color:black;\n\tfont-size: 25px;\n\tfont-family: Lucida, sans-serif;\n}\n\na.link-internal, a.link-external {\n\tcolor: red;\n}\na.link-internal:hover, a.link-external:hover {\n\tcolor: white;\n\ttext-decoration: underline;\n}\n\n#passages a.link-external:after {\n\tcontent: normal;\n}

the game started up\n\nand i remember being [[scared]]\n\neven now, i'm not really sure why\n\nbut this was a level of violence made me feel more than disinterested\n\nit frightened me

\nwas it that [[we were both compensating for something]]?\n\ncould it be that [[i was just too young]]?\n\n[[i don't know]]

by gta standards by the map is obviously tiny. for the most part there isn't much to say about it\n\nthe things i find interesting are the [[boat]] and also the [[desert]]\n\n[[return|Start]]

it bothered me as a kid\n\ni mean, this was it? the most played game?? grand theft auto??\n\nit just seemed bleak... part of why i found game maker interesting was so much of the stuff people were creating was the opposite of what my friends were into\n\nattempting to recreate [[that stuff]] seemed so boring\n\n[[return|Start]]

i was 11 years old or therebouts\n\nit was at a [[visit]] to a friend's house\n\nsomething that was pretty rare for me, back then. i was probably more introverted at that time than i am now

crimelife 2 was released on the 19th of october 2007 on the yoyo games [[showcase|sandbox]]\nby the end of that year, it was the 4th most played game there\n[img[images/fourth.png]]\n\nfrom around early 2008 to april 2016 (the shutdown of the yoyogames [[sandbox]]) it was the [[most played]] game on the site.\n[img[images/first.png]]\n\n[[return|Start]]

rocketlunchers. lol\n\n<<return>>

i never played any of the gta games\n\nbut i did [[watch]] a friend play one of them, once

the desert is unfinished. moreover, the map is unfinished\n\nof course you have to have a map. gta has a map. all good video games have a map\n\nbut the lack of a map makes the brief visit to this pocket of the world way more interesting... there's so little to do here but it's refreshing when you can't just look up where everything is. it almost feels like a secret place, like you went out of bounds or something and aren't supposed to see any of it\n\n\n[img[images/desert.png]]\n\ni've never seen npcs spawn in the desert either. a truly empty world\n\n<<return>>

maybe he sensed that there was something wrong with me\n\nmy complete disinterest in typical "masculine" things\nwas that why it was bothering me? was this game just the perfect example of the kind of things i hated, a thing that all my friends chastisted me for not playing?\n\nmaybe\n\nat the same time, he was trying to prove something within himself\nsome kind of [[manhood]]\n

the buildings... in the world of crimelife entering a building is the only reprieve from a life of crime\n\nthere's a [[theater]]\n\nand an [[art gallery]] \n\nand also a [[bowling alley]]\n\nthere's a police department too but you can't shoot at people in the buildings so what is the point\n\n[[return|Start]]

things [[beyond]] my imagination\n\n

it's totally empty\n\n[img[images/movie1.png]]\n\nbut besides wandering the empty rows of seats, tucked away in the back is [[something special]]\n\n[[return|building]]

i'm writing this for a jam about "forgotten games"\nis crimelife 2 a "forgotten game"?\n\nwell, this is the internet. nothing is [[forgotten]]\n\non the off chance this game is mentioned, it's in one of two contexts:\n\n[[1. download portal crap]]\n\n[[2. shitty games fodder]]\n\nbut there's also a [[third context|secret third context]]\n\n[[return|Crimelife 2]]

i hope it stays that way\n\n[[end|https://www.yygarchive.org/game/14296]]

there are a bunch of cars, all with different top speeds\n\n[img[images/car.png]]\n\nhonestly the cars are the most important part of this game, since shooting is clunky the best way to commit murder is to run people over\n\nalso there's a helicopter which is fun\n\n[img[images/heli.png]]\n\ni like to fly outside the sky and into the void\n\n<<return>>

a brief history of the yoyo games showcase/sandbox\n\ngame maker was created in 1999 by mark overmars. if you're not familiar with it, the main draw - for younger kids anyway - was that you could basically make games using a drag and drop system. but, in addition to that system, you could also write code using the game maker scripting langugage - "the best of both worlds", as it were.\n\n[img[images/dragndrop.png]]\n\nso, if you made a game in gm, where would you upload it? overmars kept a page on his personal site from around 2000-2004 where he would link to notable games he was sent\n[img[images/overmars.png]]\n\n\n[img[images/overload.png]]\n\neventually this became too much for overmars to manage... so fan communities sprung up... one of the notable ones was gamemakergames\n\n[img[images/gmg.png]]\n\none of the larger ones was called "games showcase" (gmshowcase.dk) <- important\n\n[img[images/showcase.png]]\n\nbut by the time i was really messing around with game maker, this was all in the past. in 2007, overmars struck a deal with dundee-based company yoyo games. development of game maker shifted over to the yoyo games team, while overmars took an executive position there.\n\n[img[images/yoyofirst.png]]\n\nat the same time, yoyogames.com was created, and the yoyo games showcase was made, where users could upload their games. while some sites (like gamermakergames) would continue to exist, for the most part there was a major shift towards the showcase. it's kind of hard to mention game maker around 2007 and not bring up the yoyo games showcase at all - especially if you were on the younger end and hadn't heard of the older sites. i knew of them and still browsed them, but by that time they were already at the end of their lifespan\n\n\n\nwhy was it called "the yoyo games showcase"? well, yoyo games also bought out games showcase/gmshowcase. lots of its games were transferred over to the yoyo games showcase, without any input on behalf of the authors\n\nfun fact: if you go look through the archives and see a game made by "anonymous", that means it was from games showcase, transferred over, and from the time it was transferred to the sites death, nobody ever claimed it as their own work. presumably the creators weren't even aware their stuff was now on a totally different website\n\n\nin 2011 the showcase was renamed the sandbox and moved to sandbox.yoyogames.com. this was to make way for a new "showcase", which would display "polished", successful games hand picked by the yoyo games team, in an effort to make game maker more professional.\n\ni guess you can't make much money off a game engine when your main site shows off crimelife 2 and a mario kart clone with ripped sprites as "yoyo legends"\n\n\nthat was the context of the site, which i felt necessary to include here. it wasn't a close knit community but a machine designed to turn game maker into a money spinner. the way i felt about any game there was a private thing, excluding the few times i would rate or comment on a game or post on the forums (which, of course, would be seen by nobody anyway)\n\n[[return|Crimelife 2]]\n

but it's hard to pinpoint what "that stuff" was\n\ni mean, probably half of the games people were making in game maker were remakes or clones, usually with ripped sprites\n\na billion marios and sonics battling each other endlessly\n\nthat didn't bother me at all\n\nbut crimelife 2 of all things, made me roll my eyes\n\n<<return>>

the yoyo games sandbox is particularly well preserved\n\nif we count the games on it from games showcase, there's stuff from 2005 or so on there\n\n<<return>>

bagenzo

i still feel kind of bad about talking about this aspect of my childhood, like even now i can see something kind of defective in myself\n\n<<return>>

i was never attracted to violent games as a kid\n\npart of this, i think, was due to deliberate effort by my parents, who tried (and failed) to stop me from watching or playing all kinds of awful shit, but even when we got a computer (and policing me quickly became impossible) my interests remained decidedly non violent\n\neven in something like runescape i would [[only train the non combat skills]]\n\n\nanyway\n\nshooting people in crimelife 2 is kind of finnicky, since you need to line up your aim of fire with people... you can't use the mouse to target a general range - you can only click to fire directly in front of you\n\ni recommend the shotgun which is powerful enough to kill even the kevlar-protected cops in 1-2 hits\n\nkilling cops/civilians rewards you with cash (which you want). you're free to kill with impunity since dying simply drops you off in front of the hospital (you don't even need to pay for your treatment!)\n\n[img[images/hospital.png]]\n\n[[return|Start]]