Monopoly Tycoon

Publisher: Atari
Developer: Deep Red
Genre: Business Strategy
Release Date: Sep 24, 2001
ESRB: EVERYONE
Number of Players: 1-4

Most previous PC games based on Monopoly have gone in one of two directions: They either combine the classic property-trading game with another popular license, as in Monopoly Star Wars Edition, or they use the strong Monopoly brand and distinctive graphics to spruce up another type of game, as in Monopoly Casino. Fortunately, Monopoly Tycoon breaks the mold by using the popular board game as the base on which to build a strong and innovative, and great-looking, real-time game of business management and city building.

Monopoly Tycoon is the kind of game you might have imagined as a kid while you played the real board game. The game includes all the familiar Monopoly elements, such as buying and selling properties and utilities, collecting rent, and managing your money, but it expands on the idea by letting you build a variety of retail and residential buildings and then manage your businesses by setting stock amounts, prices, and rent. If you've ever wanted to see what an expensive Boardwalk hotel would look like up close, this is your chance. While Monopoly purists may be wary of the numerous changes and additions that have been made to the classic game, the end result is a pleasing and challenging blend of city building and economic management, all created in the familiar, lighthearted style of Monopoly.

You begin the game with a set amount of money in 1930, at which point the game's virtual city is only sparsely built. You can proceed to invest in property, utilities, and railroads, as well as build businesses. The game's easy-to-use research and analysis functions help you choose where to build different types of structures--for instance, a poll conducted on a specific city block may reveal that the various inhabitants want more bread and meat, indicating that a butcher shop or bakery would do well at that location. It's important to do some research before building, since there are more than 40 types of potential businesses, and some will be more profitable than others. The game also provides statistics on what types of people live in or commute to the city, which helps you figure out what kind of residential structures to build.

The property-management portion of Monopoly Tycoon comes into play when you want to lease an entire city block. You compete against up to five other business owners during the game, and at any point, one of you can flag a city block for auction, and all the others then have a chance to bid for that property. Once you've leased a block, you become the landlord and collect the rent from the businesses on that block for a period of time. If you lease all of the blocks in a color group (which represents a district or neighborhood, as in the board game), you gain the right to build hotels, along with other advantages such as lower buyout costs. As the years pass in the virtual city, new businesses become available, such as ice cream parlors, bowling alleys, and nightclubs, and eventually supermarkets, video stores, and computer stores.

Monopoly Tycoon has a wide variety of single-player scenarios with goals that range from building the largest empire by a certain year, to gaining the most popular votes to become mayor of the city. There's even a Survivor-style last-man-standing scenario, where the city inhabitants vote players out of the game one by one. The game runs in real time through day/night cycles, each of which represents five years of game time, and time can also be accelerated to speed through the occasional slow period. Most scenarios last between 30 minutes and an hour or so as the game progresses from the 1930s up through the 1990s. The game includes three difficulty levels, which adjust the strength of the opponents' artificial intelligence as well as your starting funds, and even the easiest level should provide plenty of challenge and entertainment for most players.

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Requirements:

Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP,

233MHz CPU,

64MB RAM,

200MB free disk space

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