Humour

Top five CIO games

T A Balasubramanian lists the top five games that CIOs had enjoyed playing last year

As 2005 has just faded away, it’s time for you, Papyrus Bytewala, the overworked CIO of Baffle Corporation, to look back at the many great games you had enjoyed playing last year. Independent CIO gaming continues to grow each year offering game experiences that you can’t find anywhere else. Of course, these are games of great strategy, stealth and subterfuge, not to mention speed and style. You can hone your skills by playing them at any time, even during office hours. But you’re doing that already.

Cobolia

Developer: Ancient Software
Genre: Strategy in mythology

Clearly Cobolia’s world is inspired by video games and the amazing promises of computing from decades ago. The Cobolians themselves are stick figure characters that would fit into old Atari 2600 games.

Dr Legacy, renowned old game developer has created a huge quantum mainframe grid and a virtual world called Cobolia where each inhabitant has its own “spirit” that is released upon the Cobolian’s deletion. That spirit is then imprinted in a new Cobolian life, which means that new Cobolians learn from their past. Unfortunately, some of the “digital DNA” was corrupted, resulting in a virus-like infection.

You, Papyrus, the smartest CIO in the universe, have managed to hack your way into the network, which surprises Dr Legacy, but he is desperate and requires help. You must destroy the viral infection and save the Cobolians. As hard as it is to describe this game, it’s likely that five to 10 years from now people will reminisce about playing Cobolia much like people today talk about playing the original Doom.

Demo-crazy

Developer: Demo Demons
Genre: Strategy adventure

Try this demo. What would you, Papyrus, do if you, the humble CIO, became the president or prime minister of your country? Demo-crazy lets you find out how you would fare as the leader of a well-developed IT-savvy country, such as the USA, Canada, or India.

What really makes the game great is the wide-open aspect of the game play and the ability to really do whatever you want, but there are always consequences. If you are feeling just a bit sinister you might try legalising sensitive data duplication while requiring programming to be taught in nurseries. Demo-crazy takes your through your full terms in office, provided you are not assassinated along the way or voted out.

For CIOs who dread real politics, Demo-crazy is a very complex and instructive game. You’ll never look at politicians the same way once you realise that, in order to remain in power, you will have to compromise a lot. For example, you may find yourself radically changing some weird policy because you need more votes from hackers in the upcoming elections—despite the fact that this is against your corporate security strategy in Baffle.

Mexican Data Mafia

Developer: Business Banderas
Genre: Action adventure

Mexican Data Mafia takes you back to the good old days when Grand Theft Data was a top-down, 2-D CIO game. It takes you back to the days when Antonio Banderas, who looks like your CFO, Fin Fina, was a desperado with vengeance on his mind.

Your data gets corrupted, in front of impressionable programmers, no less, by Miss Print, the leader of the Gigo Gang, who escaped from prison and went on to terrorize the IT industry. Her sly actions cannot be tolerated and you’re on a mission to take down each of the members of the Gang: Typo, Buggy, Syntax and Hyphen.

How are you going to take these dangerous men, and Miss Print herself, down? With a couple of firearms, a sweet debugging ride and your arrow keys, or if it strikes your fancy, the hash keys. You view the action from a top-down perspective, use the keyboard to move your data packets around, and aim with the mouse. Your weapons are limited by the space inside your disk, so when you begin, you can only fire out of the left side of your keyboard. As you move up in the world and purchase better disks, you gain armour, speed, cargo space, and gun space, meaning you can go faster, take more damage and fire all sorts of ammunition from both side of your keyboard.

The music makes you, Papyrus, feel like you can taste the dust of the disks as you whirl around fighting desperados in Mexico. CIO gamers looking for an action fix should definitely take the time to check MDM out.

Penguin Trouble

Developer: Mad Hatter Software
Genre: Strategy

The Windoves of a small Micro Seas archipelago are not amused: A group of Leanox raiders got so drunk that, thanks to navigational ineptitude and the occasional tropical storm, they were shipwrecked and washed ashore on one of the Micro Sea islands. The now somewhat sober Leanoxes have decided to stay for a while and raid the native villages for fun and new loot, which leads to all-out warfare for the control of the little island.

Penguin Trouble tones the real-time CIO strategy genre down to its bare essentials and creates a game that is so simple that anyone can play it.

You are given five kinds of units and three kinds of archiotectures in total—they are equivalent and have the same names for both Windoves and Leanoxes. The units are your faithful resource for gathering plain coders, cheap hack warriors, tough Java warriors, and the fearsome Penguin warrior, all named after the main resource their weapons are made of. Yes, there are weapons made of coloured hats, even chameleons, in this game, and they are full of nasty surprises.

If you want a break from the stranglehold of Windoves, or if you think it’s time to reduce the isolation of proprietary islands, then Penguin Trouble is for you.

IT Oasis

Developer: Silicon Folly
Genre: Historic adventure

Oasis takes the idea of building up an IT empire (which takes 40 or more hours to play in the original civilization), and reduces it to a game that is completed in two to three minutes, packing a very powerful punch of both strategy and entertainment.

The game places you in the role of an e-business ruler. Each level starts out with the board hidden behind a ‘fog’ that keeps you from knowing what is out there. So the first thing you will do is explore. Each step you take through the silicon desert will add ‘coders’ to your cause. The coders will help you as you progress forward to do research, build data highways and amass an IT department to protect your Data Centre.

As you make your way through the desert, you will find paper mountains, which often block your path but contain data mines which make research possible. In addition, you will find server farms, always within two spaces of a data circle.

The goal that you, Papyrus, have on hand, is to build up your Data Centre so that you can survive a barbarian hacker attack that happens suddenly at the end of 85 turns.

The challenge of the game is in balancing your resources and determining what strategy to take. For example, you receive two coders for passing over a data circle, but within the desert there are also some abnormal data squares which will increase your coders by a larger number.

Consultants, called Garner Bots, change the game play dramatically if they join you by granting special abilities for the turns that they are with you, such as extra defensive power, increasing data complexity, or more visibility of the map without exploring it.