This one's almost notorious… hailed for being super realistic, because three years of programming work by a real-life pilot had gone into it, it having been developed in cooperation with Airbus and Lufthansa… and, as every single contemporary review will point out, a thick manual sporting 150 pages of detailed descriptions of virtually everything, including basic explanations of flight physics, plus an even thicker book of approach routes towards all major western European airports are contained in the package! Wow, right?
Life simulation games have a special charm: On the one hand you go through your motions from day to day, on the other hand you want to escape it by having a go at the motions of someone else. So, you kind of ask yourself what it would be like to replace your daily routine with a more exciting one from somebody else. And that is the crucial point of the genre: Is the virtual life different enough to entertain you? Has it got enough distractions to offer, at least for a short while? For Space Jobs the answer is clearly no. Because although shows signs of some promising attempts, they get lost in a maze of advertisements, half-done ideas and programming bugs.
A quick glance at the screenshots of this game may cause some to assume that this is a digital version of the very well-known board game Othello, which is particularly popular in Japan. Unlike Othello, the present game called Spot is played exclusively on the computer. This is because the rules require a complex regrouping of the pieces for almost every move. This can be handled better virtually than with real board game equipment. At the time that the basic rules for Spot were invented, the Internet was not anywhere as widely spread as today. Therefore, the artificial intelligence became the adversary of choice. Competition between human opponents is still rather rare, in contrast to Othello.