This is a wonderful, intuitive game! It teaches you you about the production of typical American goods.
The single player mode:
Your goal: Ultimate domination of the US industries. Your plan: Inslave the entire human race, and force them to plant and sell Christmas trees. The game's plan: To start you off with a set amount of money, and train you in the ways of a salesman.
This game has a certain ring to it. It allows you to create and sell everything from Fruit to Cars. Some of these are Doughnuts, Garden Gnomes, Beer, Wine, Dolls, Plastic Cars, Action Figures, Toilet Paper, Comic Books, Lawn Mowers, Power Tools, Detergents, Jeans, Nylon Clothes, and as mentioned before, Christmas Trees.
This game is played as a RTS style game, and has sevral different maps, with small citys, average citys, and of course, large citys. There are deposites of many different materials, including quartz sand, used to make glass, petroleum, used to make plastic and rubber, iron, used to make steel, among other things, and copper, used to make wire. You have farms to make fruit, beef, milk, wool, wheat, cotton, and alligator skins. You can ship things via trucks, trains, and planes. Different objects sell better in different seasons. Christmas trees, for a great example, sell mostly during winter. Indoor toys also sell better in the rainy seasons. Some rainy years fail to yield large amounts of crops, and some sunny years also fail you crops. Some years plastics are in, some years they're not. It's all about the market.
The idea is simple. The work is not. For example, to create a car, one must mine copper wire. Then they should transport it to a warehouse with a nearby electrical factory. You should then create an oil drilling derrik, that mines petroleum. Turn that into plastic. Transport it to where to the copper wire is being held. Then instruct the factory to create the item "Electrical Components", using the wire and plastic. At the same time, you should be mining iron, and tuning it into steel. Turn the steel into a "car body". Get more steel, and more electrical components, and use them to make an "engine". Mine more petroleum, and turn it into "rubber". More steel. Take the rubber and the steel, and make "tires".
Now take the Engine, Electrical Components, Car body, and Tires to a Car Factory.
Congratulations. You have made your first car.
Now ship it (most convieniently by airplaine, you have to have to build two airports plus airplaines to do this.) to a warehouse with a car dealer ship nearby to sell it. Oh, and did I mention you can make sports cars, too? plus half of the work for twice the price.
This is the basic idea of this game. Don't worry, though. Most products are much easier to sell that this. Take fruit, for example. All you have to do is build a farm or two. when harvesting time comes, truck the fruit over to a store in the city, and wait for it to sell. You sell things like fruit first, and slowly work your way up to cars.
Unfortunetly, the campaign mode is annoying. It won't give you much time to enjoy the game. It's full of turnover rates, company value, and profit deadlines.
The Single Player mode gets a score of 8/10.
The multiplayer Mode:
I don't even want to go there. But I figure I should. Take the single player mode, and stick four other players in there. What do you get? A mess. A big, sloppy mess. Imagine that you just got all of the materials to manufacture cars. Except the copper wire. You can't mine copper, because one or all of your opponents have used up all the copper, or built mines over all of it. Then you get mad about it, and build 5,000 trucks mindlessly going back and forth on the roads your opponents do most of their shipping on, so their products won't sell. If someone get's mad and they quit, it screws up the whole game. The whole system makes for an unpleasent environment.
It would be better if it was a team game, and everyone tried to work together to help the economy.
The multiplayer mode gets a score of 3/10.
The Sound/Music:
The sound effects for this game are very few. The sounds that are there, however, are high quality, and sound quite realistic. The music will repeat itself, but it lasts for a long time. It's very memorable, while being creative. It may get old after a while, but after not hearing it for some time, it's welcome back to you computer.
Some more sound effects would be nice.
The Sound/Music gets a score of 7/10.
The graphics:
The graphics are nicly done, but there aren't that many buildings, etc. That's pretty much all there is to them.
The graphics get a score of 7/10
Summary:
This is the kind of game that you'll feel like playing by yourself. It doesn't get old quickly, and has it's own Weather System and Economy. It has some downfalls, but no real problems. This game is also void of glitches, as far as I can tell. This is also an educational game. You'll learn about when the electric toothbrush was released. Along trains and planes. You'll find out who released which models, and when. if they were a success, or a failure. (If a failure, you'll find out on your own once they all shut down at the same time.) It's a game that takes practice, and work, but once the work is finished, it feels very rewarding.
Alter