Tycoon

City Traffic Simulator is, in fact, a tram sim; that is, you operate a light rail car in an invented European city.

There's a bit of a sim/tycoon aspect; you don't lay new lines, but you earn money by transporting passengers, with which you may purchase new tram cars. You start with the ability to run only one of several routes in the city, and unlock new routes by successfully transporting some number of passengers of different social classes.

Blue blooded aristocratic siblings trying to kill each other with an army of killbots and an arsenal of mind control rockets. Media corrupted, Presidents bribed, shares purchased, commodities manipulated - sound familiar? In Terry Cavanugh's pre-apocalyptic vision, illustrated with poise by Derek Yu, we have a game that is both lightweight in scope and heavy in connotation. You start the game by choosing from a family of rich assholes with different asshole proclivities, one is a politico, another a finance geek, another is a straight-up fascist and yet another is a science nerd, (but a mean nerd, not one of the nice ones). These people represent both the stark genius hiding in our frontal lobes but also the misappropriation of resources toward determined psychopaths, at the expense of the rest of society. It's like Oilgarchy but mil-gov and more pulp.

He's done it again, Paolo Pedercini has made a fun, polished, punk-positive satire, but this time instead of focusing on a particular industry or scandal, he's taking a broad-view of a world economy driven and chained by oil. In Oiligarchy you play the CEO of an international oil company, drilling your way to riches and dominance. I've been looking forward to this game since Paolo mentioned it to me at Games for Change in June, he told me "the better you are at the game, the worse you'll do."

Andrew Ewanchyna is among a scant handful of people who've been making their living as indie game developers for years; his most interesting title is Starships Unlimited, a rather innovative 4X game, though Starship Kingdom and Battleship Chess aren't bad either.

He describes Loco Mogul as "a cross between Oasis and Railroad Tycoon."

Subscription based MMOs... it's a genre that reminds me of my retarded cousin Jamie, or Falstaff; forlorn, comically maligned, blunt in its triumphs and sloppy in its failures. After WoW hit a milestone and started making headway in China, a flood of venture capital went to start-up studios making WoW-esque subscription based MMOs - this is actually a pretty standard pattern for venture investment, but what's significant is that all of these investments demand 3 to 4 years of lead-time and tens of millions of dollars to get to a revenue event. Meanwhile the market trended toward free-to-play, gameplay patterns started warping out of the level-n-grind mode, and global consumer confidence hit the peak of a 25-year boom. A comedy of errors if there ever was one.

MMORPG Tycoon is an interesting experiment in meta-game design, created in just over a month for TIGS' procedural gameplay contest. On hearing this concept, you're probably thinking a lot more grandiously than what's actually delivered, but that's ok. You'll find yourself boxed into the RPG model, adjusting monster and class numbers, setting up zone distributions for a smooth leveling curve - you won't be doing any bold economic or social experiments with your virtual MMO (so meta). What you will be doing is getting an interesting insight into the 'script MMO business, and if you have any experience working in an MMO studio or have friends who have, then you'll get a good chuckle as well.

The game involves setting zones with level ranges, trying to keep them distributed so your servers don't overload ("due to the coding practices of ShadiSoft"), making sure there are enough towns and respawn points, and trying to keep monster and class stats on keel. Your primary metric for success is your forum buzz, you want more positive posts than negative, and the main factor for this is how hard or easy the game is. Here's where the punchline starts getting set-up: no matter how well you do a portion of players will complain the game is too easy, and a portion will complain the game is too hard. However, as long as you've got some content in, and you've got a half-competent balance, people will play, get addicted, and you'll grow, even though your churn rate might only be slightly lower than your growth rate. And you'll make money. You only have to get the basics down and then just let the game run. The implication is that you don't need a good game, you just need an addictive game. It smacks you in the face with a procedural resonance, the derivative names of the rival MMOs are just icing on the cake.

In addition to being a clever commentary and fairly interesting experiment in procedural content, the game also features a really slick vector-graphics engine. I don't know if Trevor Powell has experience working in MMOs, polishing derivative content just enough to let the McDonald's-esque cognitive process do its work, but I sure hope he keeps doing innovative stuff with procedurally arrayed vector patterns. I'd also like to officially christen a new genre of games that lampoon shady design and business patterns in the game industry, with Petri Puhlo's game being the original. Or is there some obscure game from the 80s that I don't know about?

“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.