Macaw wrote:A rather unknown genre of games I've recently become interested in. I guess the first one was the French PC game Bivouac, which is surprisingly in depth for such a game in 1987. Basically you choose a mountain path and scale it, but you have a shitload of equipment you have to manage to keep yourself from fucking up and dying, such as food, safely hooks and ropes, shovels for building temporary shelters, and so on. Its really the complex simulation aspect that makes the simple idea of climbing a mountain pretty interesting for a game.
Anyways, it seems Japan had a bit of a fetish for the genre for a period. Here is some dudes site dedicated to a bunch of such games, none of which I've had the chance of playing yet: http://www.ne.jp/asahi/gamo/yama/data/game/game.htm
Looking over them, the immediate one that catches my eye is Power Climb, released by KSS in that weird period when pc98 was being replaced by windows computers, so its on win95. I wouldn't be surprised if the same team that did the Mujintou Monogatari games at KSS did this one, judging from those character portraits. Seems to keep track of a tonne of stats and equipment, and appears to have nice 2d graphics. Also having such a visually bland concept dressed up in the usual KSS jazz also sets this one apart from the others. Clear scan of the back of the box here: http://www.comshop.ne.jp/images/item/49 ... 0837_b.jpg
All the other games listed on the site except for Everest are for ps1, and most suffer from shitty ps1 3d. Souten no Shiroki Kami no Za is an exception though, and appears to be a full hardcore simulation with mostly static graphics. Doesn't have the 'action' element that Power Climb has, but could prove to be a good pure sim.
Aconcagua looks like it could be cool though probably more an adventure game than a sim.
I'm keeping an eye out for Power Climb as I'm desperate to try it, and I'll probably check out some of the ps1 stuff eventually.
I haven't looked into it, but just from reading the above post I would say that it is a subgenre, not a full-fledged genre. From his description, it sounds more like a, let us say, logistics simulator -- a logistics game, in the same genre as something like Sim City or A-Train or any number of business simulators, only with a different theme.
