Beauty School Lag Dropout? Beauty Factory Demo
Perhaps inevitably after casting my eye over My Dream Job: Babysitter, in my continuing attempts to get in touch with my inner teenage girl, I'd find myself urgently downloading the new demo for Beauty Factory. Which sound distasteful, but far preferable to me trying to get in touch with any outer teenage girls. Or, at least, preferable for the outer teenage girls.
Impressions below. Of the demo. Obv.
For a start, anyone attracted by the pouty ladies above - either wanting to be with them or be them - is going to be sorely disappointed. This is what the game tends to look like...
Sexy lab coats.
The idea is basically you have multiple departments to develop, make and market your fine smelly-stuff. The production and marketing sides of the game are familiar to anyone who's played a Tycoon game - one is about making enough stuff for people to buy and the other is about making people want to buy your stuff. Though the latter does show some astute understanding of the art of marketing:
Yes, everyone should advertise on the internet for impressively low rates to reach more consumers. Ideally, on this part of the internet.
The key element is the perfumes themselves. You have to mix the three ingredients in differing proportions and then test with consumers - with only a couple of clues to what's in fashion right now. Each test costs a little money, so encouraging you to limit your guesses before you go broke by paying for mass-sniffing. You then sell it until the fashion changes - which it does every ten turns or so - when you mix up a new batch. At this point, all your previously made perfume in your warehouse magically turns into your new batch, so you can continue to sell it without pouring it all down a sewer in the middle of the night.
But bar this one element - which actually brings to mind Patrick Suskind's excellent Perfume, if only because it's the only piece of perfurme-based pop-culture I know - it could be any other cheap Tycoon game. Which means I walk away feeling a little sad, as I was hoping for something hilarious. At the least, I was hoping for animal testing.
(Which actually in it by implication as there's an event where protestors turn up outside a competitor's factory, complete with angry placards. Presumably annoyed about flopsy having his eyes turned red raw with stinky stuff)
To its credit though it does have one of the cuter "Demo over" screens I've ever seen.
Anyway - here's a video of it in action, complete with great LA Law-esque saxaphone also appears out of nowhere half way through the trailer...
In other associated news, I danced with a worrying level of commitment to all of the Grease megamix with my girlfriend at the previously mentioned RPS wedding. This wasn't included, but gave my the title-gag, so gets linked.
For no real reason at all, which is the only reason worth a damn.