Spring Break Preview

Some of the biggest and most famous parties of each year include Mardi Gras in New Orleans and New Year's Eve celebrations around the world. But the perennial favorite of unruly college students is spring break--the wonderful week before Easter Sunday and after exams, during which everyone goes wild. And developer Deep Red, creator of Risk II and Monopoly Tycoon, figured that this magical holiday would make for a great management game. Spring Break (also known as Beach Life in Europe) iswill be a game that will let you run a vacation resort for boatloads of guests whothat are looking to relax, unwind, and do a little partying.

Which way to the beach?

Judging from what we've seen of the game so far, Spring Break will try to make this festive atmosphere come alive with bright colors and spirited music. Spring Break is already shaping up to be a very colorful game with full day-and-night cycles, so your resort will be sunny during the day and appropriately dark at night--but alight with the sights and sounds of your resort's nightlife. We've already been able to sample some of the game's soundtrack, which consists of the kind of upbeat rock and techno music you'd expect to hear on stage at a beach party, or on the dance floor of a nightclub.

Spring Break's interface will look a lot like the one used in The Sims, and will look similar to a lot of other management games, too. You'll control most of what happens in the game using a set of buttons, menus, and meters at the bottom of the screen that will let you build new buildings, monitor your guests' happiness, and adjust all the prices of your goods and services. You'll also be able to click on any of your resort's businesses for a quick rundown on how successful they've been, and whether or not the prices on your goods and services are too high. Spring Break will also have a mini-map that will let you quickly jump back and forth across your resort, as well as a few handy additional options, like the ability to snap your camera onto a single guest. This is an especially good idea if you've got unhappy guests, which will be indicated on screen bywith a "thumbs down" icon over their heads.

Keep your guests happy by fulfilling their needs.

You'll be able to keep track of your guests' general happiness level with the help of a SimCity-style event ticker that will alert you when certain guests are particularly unhappy, and it will suggest why. For instance, some guests on the beach may get a hankering for ice cream, so you'll receive a hint from the ticker to build an ice cream stand there. And every so often, guests will arrive on a new boat to pitch their blankets on the sand, buy sodas and ice cream from your concessions stands, or cut a rug in your nightclubs. Guests will have varying needs, including hunger, thirst, and the need to take a trip to the bathroom, and they'll even have a "flirt" value, which represents how likely they are to find a compatible partner on the beach, either in the form of another like-minded guest, or a stunning lifeguard.