Lost your job? Wife left you? Wanted for armed robbery? Ever get the feeling you’ve cocked up your life a bit? Then why not try a new one!

While I hesitate to call it a game per se, Educational Simulations.com have a rather nifty little program available for free trial. Called Real Lives, it allows you to vicariously live the entire life of an individual in any country in the world, making decisions on everything from lifestyle to investments to whether or not you should smack your wife around, all the while being fed lots of interesting facts about whatever country your avatar has chosen to live in. And it’s all surprisingly good fun. The entire course of a life only takes about twenty minutes, during which time you can get an education, get married, move into a lovely new house, have exhaustive amounts of kids, contract about three hundred diseases and die. Then again you could go another route, drop out of school, dodge the draft, go to prison, get a job swabbing toilets, move into a slum, marry, get divorced, watch your brothers and sisters become rich and successful, then contract about three hundred diseases and die. In many ways it’s a rather bleak representation of life, but that just makes it all the more realistic. Ah, cynicism, my only friend.

Give it a download and have a go. Once you’ve seen what kind of miserable existences people can have in the world, it’ll surely brighten up your day.