I bought a copy of Afterlife from one of the Scholastic catalogues when I was in primary school after already having had a blast with Sim City 2000.
I absolutely loved the graphics and the theme and everything, but as it turns out, I had absolutely no idea how to play it and never got far enough into it to really appreciate its gameplay.
I should probably give it another go as an adult who has a bit more patience for reading through instructions than I did as a kid.
1. Find a map with the maximum amount of buildable space
2. Start the game with the maximum speed to above 5000 years
3. Build Hell first and only
4. Pause, build the portal already thinking in upgraded form.
5. Build long straight roads, columns spaced 4 from each other, avoid crossing
6. Check the sins demand
7. Usually, the green is the most demanded
8. Don’t touch anything about the planet
9. This is key: using green as example, build 2x2 spaced so the neighbor is diagonal, never adjacent.
10. Build your first wave of buildings, and essentials (dystopias, the trams, etc. I assume you know those things)
11. Open the portal, make a lot of money
12. Upgrade the portal, make more money
13. Max capacity reached, starting to lose souls and money, you adjust the building’s efficiency to white for every building manually until you are rich
14. Buildings start to reach its top version and capacity, lock them
15. Activate the bats , y to their guano are excellent to upgrade the buildings. Also keep other disasters away during a grace period
16. Then keep growing, adjusting buildings efficiency, more portals, more buildings
17. You only need half the Hell, to achieve hell’s Omnibulges
18. Then star heaven
19. Follow heaven best practices and you reach to Love Domes very easily and rich af
20. I would only train later in the game. Build the best training school, make it only accept top 10%, left side, watch and leave 20% no lower because it can cause excess oof demons or angels, unless you want to see the a special ending
21. Endings can be quite fun to achieve (then you want to mess up with the planet)
I'd recommend this. As kids my brother and I could never complete a game on the BBC Micro called Imogen[0]. It was amazing for the time in that your character could transform into three modes (wizard / cat / monkey) and on one screen a fourth mode, and the transformation looked smooth even back then. However - we never completed it. As an adult I found it again and while I completed it fairly easily, it was a nice memory.
I played it summer of 2005, the same year I binged Douglas Adams' complete non-HHG works (including 'Last Chance to See' on CD-ROM and the interactive fiction game, 'Bureaucracy').
Afterlife is wonderfully fun and satisfying to experience to completion for the first time, and what it might lack in replayability it more than makes up for with humor and design.
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