Facade
 

There is a new freeware game out on the PC called Facade, and it's kind of interesting.

First of all, it's not really a "game", it's more of an experiment in artificial intelligence. Imagine the AOL chat bots that you talk to they talk back... this game is kind of like that except a lot more complicated.

In the game, your friends Trip and Grace invite you over for a drink. Trip and Grace are married and having marriage problems. Your job is to just talk to them and try to get them to work out their problems. Or, you can be mean and insult them and eventually get pushed out the door, or you can try to hit on Trip or Grace or both of them.

It's not like the sims though, where you just click on "compliment person" to compliment somebody, or "insult person" to insult them, everything that you do to interact with them is through a text parser like old adventure games. If you say something like "you look nice today", they'll be flattered and compliment you back. If you compliment them TOO much, they start to get annoyed and yell at you for laying it on too thick.

Like all artificial intelligence though, it's easy to break and a lot of the time they'll be confused at what you're saying or not understand and just respond with "uh... heh.... yeah okay..."

The graphics aren't anything impressive, it reminds me of Parappa the Rapper or XIII except worse. But this isn't really a "graphics" game. I wouldn't even really consider it a "fun" game, but it's really interesting to play and it's extremely funny sometimes to see their facial expressions and responses to stuff you say.

Anyway, it's up on fileshack at:
http://www.fileshack.com/file.x?fid=7455

the official website is:
http://www.interactivestory.net

it's an 800mb download, but that's not really that big by today's standards