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Tycoon City New York

Score: 85%
ESRB: Teen
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Deep Red
Media: CD/1
Players: 1
Genre: Simulation/ Strategy

Graphics & Sound:

The graphics in Tycoon City New York are very nice. The detail is amazing, as you can zoom in to the street level and see the detail in the clothes, hair and faces of each person on the street. You can zoom in and see every upgrade you've added to each of the buildings up close and personal -- and there are a lot of different upgrades to choose from. When you choose to put a canopy on a building, you have over 20 different canopies to choose from. You can choose to color coordinate each street, each district, or the whole city, if you want to.

TCNY doesn't really have background music. Instead you hear the sounds of a busy New York street, the noise of cars driving down the streets, honking their horns, new construction going up, the buzz of people chatting on the streets, and other sounds you'd expect to hear in the city. The amalgamation of all the sounds actually provides a pleasant substitute for background music. TCNY also attempts to make you feel more like you're in New York by giving accents to the characters' voices that are appropriate to the city. Overall, the sounds in TCNY greatly aid in making you feel like you are truly building New York City.


Gameplay:

When you first launch Tycoon City New York and choose start a new game, you enter your name and choose a picture to represent you in the game. I like the fact that the game allows you to use your own pictures if you want. After that, TCNY lets you choose to either Build New York or play in the Sandbox.

If you choose Build New York, you have the option of running through the tutorial. During the tutorial, Luco teaches you the basic controls of the game (with a New York attitude, of course). After the tutorial, which does not take very long at all to run through, you've got $472,000 to start building New York. You have $500,000 if you don't play through the tutorial, because you spend $28,000 building a coffee bar during it. At this point, you're on your own to do whatever you want with the city.

You start in Greenwich Village. Throughout the game, you're presented with different "Business Opportunities", the first of which is "Student Needs". You really don't have to worry about failing these, as eventually you'll pass them; some just might take a little more time than others. The game ends whenever you want to stop building. You can continue it as long as you would like to.

If you choose Sandbox, you do have an opportunity for a little competition. You decide how much money to start with and how aggressive your opponents are. You start out with a variety of buildings across the whole city, instead of just starting in one district. Sandbox mode is the way to go if you don't have the patience to build every little piece from scratch or if you want to be able to make your opponents more of a challenge than they are in the Build New York mode.


Difficulty:

Honestly, there really is no difficulty in Tycoon City New York as a game that you can win or lose, except in Sandbox mode. There is no way to lose TCNY when you choose Build New York. The opponents, the other city investors, are easy to buy out if you want. You do have to be careful to not spend too much money early on, because you simply don't start out with much. Eventually though, you will have more money than you can manage to spend. The only difficulty is in how well you build New York to your own standards. If you want to turn your city into the perfect New York, you'll spend a lot of time on upgrading the buildings, listening to the residents to find out what they want, and checking on the needs of the businesses, your tenants, and the people on the streets. It's just not easy to keep everybody happy!

Game Mechanics:

Originally, I tried playing Tycoon City New York on my laptop, and quickly found that you're going to want an external mouse with a center wheel to play TCNY. Everything you do in TCNY utilizes your mouse. I personally found it difficult to get used to the camera rotations, at first. I never could seem to get the buildings at exactly the view I wanted, which made some of the upgrades, such as the shop clerk, difficult. When you choose an upgrade, the game flashes the spots that you can place that specific upgrade. To actually play it, you have to click on that spot. From most angles, I never could see where it was flashing to place the shop clerk, for example.

One of the things that I wanted that TCNY doesn't provide is the ability to see inside all the businesses. Some of them you can see into through the glass windows, but it's just not the level of detail I would like to have seen. Other simulations games, such as The Sims, allow you to see the inside and outside of your properties.

I first played, or attempted to play, TCNY on my laptop (Windows XP; Pentium M 1.7 GHz; 1 GB RAM; 128 MB ATI FireGL T2 ; Directx 9.0c). The system locked up seven times and blue screened twice. Atari does provide patches on their site, but unfortunately they didn't fix the video incompatibilities with my system. Even still, running it on my slower computer, which just barely meets system requirements, TCNY was a fun game at first. Before too long though, I just got bored with the lack of challenge it provided.

If you're looking for a game more like Civilization, in which there is a chance of actually losing, TCNY might not be the game for you. If you want a game that you can just build forever and make every little piece perfect with very little risk, TCNY is your game.


-Cyn, GameVortex Communications
AKA Sara Earl

Minimum System Requirements:



Windows 2000/XP; Pentium 4 1.8 GHz or AMD Athlon 1.8 GHz or higher; 512 MB RAM; 64 MB VRAM; DirectX 9.0c
 

Test System:



Windows XP; Celeron 2.7 GHz; 512 MB RAM; 64 MB VRAM; Directx 9.0c

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