Today as people across the globe celebrate the Chinese New Year – the year of the Goat – we at AnimationXpress.com would like to gift you a ‘hongbao’ of games to play. Also, with the recent lift of ban on consoles in the China, its happy times for gamers and developers as the gaming industry enters the world’s most populated country.
We list down 5 games to celebrate the New Year with references to the Chinese culture.
Goat Simulator
The year of the Goat, as it turns out to be, the one game that cannot be out of the list is Goat Simulator. Started out as a joke prototype from an internal game jam and shown in an early alpha state in YouTube videos. The game was met with much excitement and attention, prompting the studio to build the game and release it, while still retaining various non-breaking bugs and glitches to maintain the game’s entertainment value.
Goat Simulator is an open-ended third-person perspective game in which the player controls a goat. The player is free to explore the game’s world, a suburban setting, as a goat, and jump, run, bash things, and lick objects, which attaches the goat’s tongue to the object and lets the player drag the object around until they let go.
The game is now a YouTube sensation in itself with people posting gameplay videos of how insane one can go inside the game.
Crossy Roads
One of the most downloaded games from last year, Crossy Roads developed by Australian indie developer Hipster Whale and developers Andy Sum, Matt Hall, and Ben Weatherall. The endless game has you playing as a chicken passing through the roads, rivers, grass and train tracks without dying.
Why this game is on this list you may ask; well the game has many animals as playable characters and one of them is the ‘Giddy Goat’. Also, the game we hear has just received a new content update adding in three new characters to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Fortune Chicken is the latest addition to the game’s lineup of chickens, and accompanying it is the next new character, a dragon named simply XI. There are also pagodas and various other Chinese-themed decorations littering the landscape. Additionally, there are tiny red tickets you can collect with the Chinese yuan symbol on them, and it appears that if you collect enough of them you’ll be able to unlock the third character in the game, which is a mystery character.
Chinese Checkers
Chinese Checkers is a strategy board game which can be played by two, three, four, or six people, playing individually or with partners. The game is also known as Chinese chess where the aim is to take one’s pieces into the star corner on the opposite side of the board before the opponent manages to do the same.
Chinese Princess
Chinese Princess is a simulator game where you dress up the Chinese princess on display and adorn her with the traditional Chinese attires like Ruqun, Yuanlingshan, Cheongsam and many more. You also get to choose hairstyles, lipsticks, nails, eye-colour and much more to dress up the Princess.
Mahjong Solitaire
Mahjong has been one of the oldest games to have originated from China and its Solitaire version has been played all around the world. Microsoft too had incorporated the game in its Windows OS and the game is now easily available across platforms.
Mahjong Solitaire is a tile matching game with 144 tiles arranged in a special four-layer pattern with their faces upwards. A tile is said to be open or exposed if it can be moved either left or right without disturbing other tiles. The goal is to match open pairs of identical tiles and remove them from the board, exposing the tiles under them for play. The game is finished when all pairs of tiles have been removed from the board or when there are no exposed pairs remaining.