The future was there in 1994. Just shortly before, we had all been sitting in front of our Amigas playing side-scrollers. The first generation of CD-based video game consoles was showing us grainy, stamp-sized video clips embedded in "games" which were hardly worth that term. And then Wing Commander III came along. Not out of nowhere at all, but following a huge media hype. And as usual for Origin, by then their established strategy, hardly anyone had the computer to actually run it in its full glory. But who can blame them, when sales figures confirmed their success?
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.
Normality throws the player into a dystopian metropolis leaning towards the psychedelic. Right in the middle of it, you take over the role of a teenager in his fourties called Kent who finds himself in his flat which has gone under in total chaos. Due to the game being classified as appropriate for six-year-olds, there are no beer bottles, porn magazines or even a huge, filthy bong to be found. Instead, there is just a boob tube, a dripping faucet and a permanently nodding tumbler bird. The run-down gloominess of Neutropolis does not fit with the good-natured and carefree mind of the protagonist.