Tycoon

“Serious” games usually have to balance between being “educational” and being “fun”. Third World Farmer presents itself as a greatly educational game, promising to teach the player the hardships of maintaining a family in a world full of corruption, war and diseases. But once played, it turns out that it’s fairly easy to be successful. And that’s exactly why this game is actually pretty fun for an “educational” game.

There have been a number of space station sim games over the years, but in the past most have been firmly of the tycoon game style--that is, primarily about building modules and expanding your station, with some notional flow of dollars increasing if you do it well. SpaceStationSim takes a somewhat different approach; it's more of a hybrid of a life sim (the granddaddy there being The Sims) and a tycoon game. You create an astronaut, and the gameplay involves both building out your station and satisfying the needs of your crew. Which includes, naturally, things like making sure they have enough to eat and time for potty breaks--and also enough to breathe. Life on the final frontier isn't always easy.

Paolo Pedercini is a mad bastard, and the McDonald's game is his sharp, procedural satire of how fast food is a corrupt industry by necessity. The game is set up so that you cannot win without compromising. Try it, you'll see. While you can maintain mild growth without using hormones or genetically modified crops, your bosses will not be satisfied. To really succeed, you have to employ what some might call "unnatural" means, though at Corporate, they call it "McFriendly growth measures".

Yes, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa is a "tycoon" game--but quite different from others of the genre. The objective isn't to build a business, but a balanced ecosystem. For example, one level's objective is to have some number of lions in play--but to get that many, you have to build up your zebra population so there's enough prey to support your lions. And to support that many zebra, you need to plant enough bushes to sustain them.

Yet it also isn't a hard-core simulation in the style of Sim Life (and thank goodness); it's a simple, straightforward game with pleasantly animated African wildlife, and a tutorial system that anyone who can read (and this is a good game for kids) will find good and sufficient. Contrariwise, it's a tougher game to win, even on "Easy" setting, than most casual games (many of which can be won by a monkey clicking randomly).

In The Mastermind, you play a mobster building an empire of thieves, drug sales, and legitimate business for laundering your ill-gotten gains, while staving off (or crushing) competing crime bosses.

An excellent concept, and it's perhaps surprising it hasn't been done before.

Smugglers 3 hearkens back to an earlier generation of 4X space exploration and conquest games. In a way, it's the sort of game I might have played on my old Apple II--but of course much prettier graphics.

You're a starship captain during an interstellar civil war, belonging to one of four factions in the war. Your primary activities involve trading (including smuggling illegal goods, if you so choose); accepting combat missions in support of your faction; or becoming a pirate and attacking planets. As usual in games like this, you start off with a tiny ship, and progress is mainly in the form of earning enough money and rising in rank so that you can get bigger and better ships.

Real E$tate Empire is a charming sim/tycoon game in which, as you might expect, you buy houses, spruce them up, and flip them for profit. While intended primarily for the 'casual' game market (with the cartoony and brightly colored graphics this implies), it has a surprising degree of depth, and we suspect that the developer has done some real estate investing himself.

On first booting Outpost Kaloki, I thought I had the wrong game. I had been told that it was a space station management game but the graphics looked like Cartoon Network versions of retro-science fiction adventures. The Saturday morning-style of animation and the real-time nature of the game play initially fooled me. The dollar amounts popping out of businesses and the animated spaceships made the game feel very different from the "SimCity in Space" that I was expecting. Even the funny voices and alien syllables when you deal with the space aliens are a delightful addition to the game.

You could almost call Orbital Trader a casual game for geeks. It's a space trading game--you start with a small starship, move from one planet to another buying and selling stuff. You're limited to a single star system (no FTL here), and planets move over time, and you're restricted to transfer orbits, so closer planets are a lot easier to get to. Each planet has only a single commodity, and it's easy to find destinations where you can make a profit (mouseover your planet, and you'll see what its commodity fetches everywhere else in the system). And that's--really about all there is to it.

Strategy gamers who like a simulated slice of real life (and I suppose I have to use that term loosely when I speak of the "business" of Hollyweird) and the ability to control lots of details like the control freaks some of us are, Hollywood Mogul 3 is such a steak. This sequel to that old Visual Basic game has a tremendous amount more to offer than that earlier game.