A nice little trip down poli/socio commentary lane

Holler, bitches! Uh… nevermind… Apologies, I’ve been a little bit negligent lately with posting, it’s been a busy couple weeks with July 4th and such. At any rate, I have some things in the pipeline right now but I want to spend some quality time copy-editing and getting the content up to my standards.

Here’s a little something I found a couple weeks ago: Oligarchy. (The picture is linked to the game – I tried to embed it but Wordpress was being obnoxious).

Oligarchy is straight from the makers of such gems as “Operation Pedopriest” and “Faith Fighter” (Offended yet? Thought so…). La Mollendustria is a team of Italian flash designers dead set on offering the public something different from the corporate-driven gaming industry with their highly politicized games. They’ve produced “advergames” on behalf of companies for advertisement purposes, though from the look of their content, it’s mainly content to open people’s awareness and satirize mainstream affairs.

In Oligarchy, you play the role of protagonist oil tycoon (think of it as There Will Be Blood crossed with Sim City with the difficulty level of Spore if it were a flash game) starting in 1946, immediately after WWII. Your mission: get rich off of big oil and keep the board of directors happy.

The game itself, while relatively simple, is an interesting social commentary on the United States/Big Oil over the past 65 or so years. Additionally, worth checking out is the essay that La Mollendustria wrote about videogames as a political medium.

Stay tuned in the next week or so for an original article or two here.