Tycoon

Bistro Boulevard is a kind of remix of Trevor Chan's Restaurant Empire and Diner Dash. You start with one plain vanilla restaurant in a restaurant row that has seen better days; as you increase in "stars" (Michelin, presumably), you can reopen other restaurants in the row, with different sorts of cuisine.

It's tuned to a casual audience, so pretty easy, but with a continuing grind; while open, all you do is seat guests at tables that fit the party that arrives (no color-coding ala Diner Dash), which is simple if tedious. Between days, you unlock new recipes, train staff, modify decor and table arrangments, hire new staff, and so on. When I say "tuned to a casual audience," I mean things like "to train a chef from a D cook for produce to a C cook, you click and pay $100; it happens instantly."

Cities in Motion is a game in the mold of Railroad Tycoon, but with an urban setting. Four European city maps are provided with the game -- Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Helsinki (the developers are Finnish), along with a map design tool, so one presumes other cities will become available over time. You represent a private transit monopoly, apparently, since profit is the goal but there's no competition.

You may build five sorts of transit routes: buses, trams, subways (metros), ferries (water buses) and, oddly, helicopters. Thirty vehicles historically used in European cities are modelled, each with its own game stats. Bus routes are the easiest and cheapest to build; you simply place bus stops, link them together in a route, and purchase some buses to serve them. Trams require you to lay rail at street level first; and metros can be built at grade, underground, or as elevated lines.
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You're Hempie, an animated pot leaf whose chiefest ambition is apparently to become a leading supplier of high-grade maryjane to the nation. Or so Hemp Tycoon would have you believe; actually, this is a highly conventional Zynga-style "tycoon lite" game, like Farmville and its ilk. You plant shit, it grows, you harvest it, this gives you resources to plant more shit. Plus you can place lawn gnomes and the like that have modest effects on nearby plants.

Thankfully, there's no need to spam your friends for piece of chocolate or leaves or whatever crappy idea they've come up with to induce you to spend actual bucks on tedious bullshit, because the game is genuinely free to play on Adult Swim, with no Facebook credits or internal currency involved.

What's astonishing is that you'd think the lack of social network virality, and the lack of an actual business model, might have a deleterious effect on the game's popularity; au contraire, Hemp Tycoon is Adult Swim's most successful game, with 9 million plus plays.

And sure, it's by This is Pop (who have done many excellent games), so as usual the implementation is smooth and intelligently thought through; but it's still remarkable that this game style, repetitive grind and slowly progressing though it is, still works without the fruity surrounding indicia we see on Facebook.

And, of course, the fact that you're growing reefer is mildly transgressive, and a good reason you'll never see this on the FB; but still, kinda dull, if worth a look because of its design implications.

Real Estate Empire 2, (REE2) is a serious real estate investment sim that is marketed as a casual tycoon type of game. I love games that are both accurate simulations and fun because then you are tricked into learning, a most clever ploy. When Greg Costikyan did a review of Real E$tate Empire, I immediately bought a copy, because I am a fan of serious investment games. I liked Real E$tate Empire but, it was unnecessary complex in areas like the house repairs options but lacked the basics like the ability to rent. I am glad to see that these short comings were shored up in REE2.

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.