Life Aboard the International Space Station

There have been a number of space station sim games over the years, but in the past most have been firmly of the tycoon game style--that is, primarily about building modules and expanding your station, with some notional flow of dollars increasing if you do it well. SpaceStationSim takes a somewhat different approach; it's more of a hybrid of a life sim (the granddaddy there being The Sims) and a tycoon game. You create an astronaut, and the gameplay involves both building out your station and satisfying the needs of your crew. Which includes, naturally, things like making sure they have enough to eat and time for potty breaks--and also enough to breathe. Life on the final frontier isn't always easy.

Can a Game Make You Cry?

Certainly... At least if its subject is enough to make you cry.

PeaceMaker begins with a cut scene--brief video clips from the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, beginning in 1948 and ending with the present day.

In any game, the purpose of an initial cut scene is to set the emotional context; for most games, this means bombast and violent triumph. For PeaceMaker, it means--sorrow, and perhaps despair.

Created by a mixed American, Israeli, and Palestinian team, PeaceMaker deals with the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Playing as either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President, you must try to satisfy the urgent needs and demands of your own people, while establishing a degree of trust on the opposite side--and, with (a great deal of) luck, an agreed resolution to the conflict.

The Risks of American History

American History Lux, like Sillysoft's Lux Delux, uses the rules of Risk. But in this case, you play through a series of maps representing American wars (from the French and Indian War through the Iraq War), with armies and geography that shape the experience into a reasonable recreation of those wars. Not an intensive simulation, in other words, but something that does give a cool sense of historial progression. Before each level begins, you're presented with a little bit of information about the war (and a link to Wikipedia if you want to know more).