Street Cleaning Simulator
Developer: TML Studios/Astragon
Platform: PC
Pricing: Out of print — find it on eBay or Amazon Marketplace
In a nutshell: An insanely detailed opportunity to clear up virtual leaves
Above: Get ready to clean those streets.
Perhaps the most depressingly realistic vehicle simulation of recent years, Street Cleaning Simulator puts you behind the wheel of a street sweeper as you “navigate the city in search of detritus.”
The game lets you control the brushes of your vehicle individually, and has you manage your water, dirt trap, and fuel levels as you play. Publisher Excalibur Games promises a range of environments and a “dynamic particle system” to give that dust some much-needed realism.
Now, keeping the streets clean is a necessary and serious business — just ask Lou Rawls — but choosing to recreate the experience in your free time is beyond the call of duty.
Cart Life
Developer: Richard Hofmeier
Platform: PC
Pricing: Free download
In a nutshell: The side of retail you don’t see on The Apprentice
Above: Cart Life takes time to remind us how hard life can be.
The bottom end of the retail market isn’t a glamorous place to be. That’s where you’ll find yourself when you play Cart Life, the unflinchingly retail simulation created by Richard Hofmeier.
You’ll need to go through the motions of preparing for the day, working out change for your customers, feeding your own personal addictions, and ensuring you eat and sleep sufficiently.
As your character stands at the bus stop, killing time until the daily grind starts again, you’ll catch a glimpse of resignation on their pixelated face.
Released to much critical acclaim, Hofmeier’s own customers soon started complaining that Cart Life had game-breaking bugs. His response was to withdraw the game from sale on Steam and release it as an open-source product. At the time of writing, however, Cart Life’s website is mysteriously unavailable and Hofmeier seems to have dropped from public view (at least, his Twitter account is no longer live).
You can still grab the free version of Cart Life at the time of writing via the magic of Internet time travel.
Desert Bus
Developer: Imagineering
Platform: SegaCD
Pricing: Never released
In a nutshell: A bus journey along a straight road. For 8 hours.
Above: Eight hours of driving and not another soul in sight.
Desert Bus is a mini-game created by the magicians Penn and Teller for their unreleased Sega CD title Smoke and Mirrors. It involves driving from Tucson to Las Vegas in real time on a straight desert road with no other traffic, staying at less than 45 mph. The wheel alignment of the bus is slightly off so you have to constantly attend to it drifting off to the right or face being towed back to the start.
No-one ever gets on or off the bus and completing the eight hour journey rewards the player with one point and the chance to pull a double shift and head back to Tucson.
Penn Jillette discussed Desert Bus on his podcast, revealing that it was a response to criticism of violent video games led by then-Attorney General Janet Reno.
“Desert Bus was a game we thought would really appeal to people who didn’t like unrealistic games and didn’t like violence in their games,” said Jillette. “It was just like real, loving life.”
Smoke and Mirrors never saw the light of day as the publisher, Absolute Entertainment, went out of business. Desert Bus lives on, though, in Android and iOS form, and it forms the backbone of the annual charity event Desert Bus for Hope that raises money for Child’s Play.
And Everything Started to Fall
Developer: Alexis Andujar Gonzalez
Platform: Browsers (Flash)
Pricing: Free — play it here
In a nutshell: From birth to death in under three minutes
We’re all getting older, and sooner or later our bodies will start to fail. Simple things we take for granted will get harder to do, like opening a jar of pickles.
And Everything Started to Fall is a flash game that revels in reminding us of the human body’s frailties during its single, brief level of platforming action (and inaction).
Starting off as a helpless infant, you develop abilities like jumping and swimming, then lose them just as quickly as you head toward old age. Key life events are reduced to pixelated images depicting scenes of college debauchery, marriage, and work. And eventually, inevitably, you die.
Just like life.