Is Alter Ego a Choice of Games game?

Um, well I don’t believe that another company can use choicescript, make a game and sell it can they? Because a cpmpany named Choice Multiple LLC. created a game called alter ego in choisescript (it’s on android).

They can if they paid to use it. I doubt they did though.

The website says this:

This game was originally written by Peter Favaro, Ph.D. It was
published in 1986 for the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, Apple II, and Macintosh.
The Alter Ego browser game is a production of Choose Multiple LLC

So maybe this predates ChoiceScript.

The online version looks more like Twine to me, but I am no expert.

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http://www.playalterego.com/

It also looks like it’s free (or by donation). I thought it was okay to use ChoiceScript as long as you aren’t selling your games.

Alter Ego was transferred into CS by Dan Fabulich (the owner of CoG) a while ago. It’s actually what got him to start this company, if I recall correctly.

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Fear not! Choice Multiple LLC is the precursor to Choice of Games. While they didn’t create Alter Ego (it’s a really old game), I know that Dan Fabulich did work on porting it first to the web, and then to the android. (I didn’t realise the android version was in choicescript.)

I’d bet that the wish list on the site is partially responsible for the creation of Choice of Games. http://www.playalterego.com/wishlist.html

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Thank you, but I’m a bit depressed because I paid $5 for it on the play store😭.
Although it was a great game and I encourage anybody to check it out.
P.S I thought it was weird it was so much like CoG.

Don’t be depressed. At least the money didn’t go to supporting people who’d ripped off choice of games. I’m actually surprised that there’s no cross-linking between Alter Ego and Choice of Games. I’m wondering if the reason for that.

And It could be worse. Back when I was going through a phase of playing life sims I paid $25 for Real Lives. My memories of that life simulation involve dying most of the time. Lots of dying. Then shortly after I bought it they came out with a newer version. That said I suppose Alter Ego has much dying too. They should really call some of those life simulations death sims instead.

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I was really wondering where Alter Ego came from, and whether it was written in Choicescript! I never found a chance to ask.

When I looked at the App store on my iPhone, from any given COG there is a link to a list of Choice Of Games apps. One of the games listed is Alter Ego. While I could see the similarities between that and the logic of Choicescript, I wondered how such an icon-based, semi-visual game was in the same language. I wrote it off as being ingenuity along the lines of Paradox Factor, and incidentally decided to try to create some visual interfaces with conveniently placed images.

It makes sense that Alter Ego’s coding language evolved into what we now know as Choicescript. That answers a lot of my questions about that game, which was cool, but very unlike the kind of games best supported by Choicescript. (Though if it was translated entirely from the predecessor to CS, that is useful to know and bodes well for my inventory system-in-progress.)

Am I misremembering, or is that the game you said you also loved because it provided a realistic outlook on a randomly created human’s circumstances in life?

p.s.:
Edited the thread title to help people with similar questions find this discussion.

Here it is ultimately an edutainment game, but it’s at least worth checking the demo. The short is that it hands you a realistic life from a statistically random person on the world. It’s not weighted to try and hand you an upper middle class western family, it just picks someone at random, based solely on how many people live in any given region at any given time (so most likely to be born in China or India, followed by pretty much the rest of the world), and then it hands you major life events based on where you are and statistics.

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Jason speaks a little about the founding of Choice of Games and how it relates to Alter Ego in the video here. I can’t remember when precisely.

Oh I see that Alter Ego on the website is different now. It’s good to see it linked up to choicescript. I only ever played it on the website, and when I posted that there weren’t any cross-links between the two.

I do actually like how the wishlist has clearly had an influence on Choice of Games.

I wouldn’t say Real Lives was enjoyable, or something that I loved. But it is interesting. There’s an app around which I think I mentioned on another thread that draws on similar data but is nowhere near as good or indepth and which I’m going to have to try and dig out the name of again.

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Alter Ego is a flawed game that I love very very much.

Here are two fascinating reviews of Alter Ego which I think capture a lot of the trouble with the game.

Adam Cadre: Review: Alter Ego “It’s fun to play, but oogy to think about.”
Jimmy Maher: » Alter Ego The Digital Antiquarian

Relentlessly hetero-normative … But then, considering the time and place that spawned it, it’s not really fair to expect much more from Alter Ego. … I do have more problems dismissing Favaro’s cluelessly demeaning sexism.

What the reviews don’t capture is the feeling I had when I died in Alter Ego. I’ve died countless times in many many games. But when I played Alter Ego for the first time, I was playing as myself. When I died in Alter Ego, it was I myself who died in Alter Ego. I’ll never forget it.

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Alter Ego is what led me to discovering COG years ago, but I had no idea about the connection between the two. Small world. (Although in hindsight, it probably should have been a bit more obvious to me…)

And @FairyGodfeather, are you thinking of Privileged? I like it, but I agree it’s not as good as Real Lives, which tends to give me little gems like this:

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oh wow! Alter Ego was positively ancient when I first played it like, a decade and a half ago, but I remember it blowing my mind at the time. It would probably feel very dated (in more than one way) today. That it has a connection to CoG though… unexpected!

I died in alter ego a lot I remember my first death was at the hand of OBO
I died so much that when I play that game I hear a digital voice go.
“This is alter ego, you have died”
It really bites when your middle aged cause now you have to completely restart.

Can you be gay in the choice of game one

In Alter Ego you can only be straight. Personally I’d love to see a version of Alter Ego where you can play a gay character but I don’t think that’s actually going to happen.

I strongly suspect that Choice of Game’s policies were heavily influenced by the amount of people who asked to be able to play as gay in Alter Ego. When there’s romance in Choice of Games there’s always the option to have same-sex or opposite sex-relations.

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I’d just like to see an updated version of Alter Ego period. It’s very outdated so things like being gay, having technology we have, etc. would be awesome.

I had a similar experience. In my case I was abducted & killed by a child sex-predator (a major concern “back then”). That was – shall we say? – most thoroughly disconcerting! :open_mouth:

What’s “OBO”?