Beach Life

Beach Life - Business Strategy

In Beach Life, you manage a holiday resort. You start out with at least a hotel, a construction yard, a complaints office, and a power generator. You have to build restaurants, discos, amusement halls, hire lifeguards, security, cleaning personnel, to keep your guests amused and safe. Some of the attractions appeal more to men, others more to women. It is important that you keep the sexes balanced.

Beach Life comes with twelve maps. They are all supposed to be part of the same archipelago, which accounts for the identical flora. Five of them are part of larger islands, and the guests arrive by bus (a lovely, 50s-style bus, BTW). The others are small islands, and the guests arrive by boat. Each map has its own weather, hazards, and difficulty setting. Easy means guests will hardly ever complain about prizes, but you have only few buildings available. Common hazards are sharks and a poor water supply. For each map there is a mission with clearly defined goals and a time limit. If you succeed, you can continue playing, and the map becomes available in »sandbox mode,« a sort of freeform play.

There are annoyances. One is the odd shape of the buildings, and the way the game handles them. Buildings in Beach Life are rarely ever exactly rectangular, there are always some tiles missing, they are far larger than buildings in similar games (in Emperor, the 5×5 mill was already one of the largest buildings; the restaurant in Beach Life is something like 15×15), and they automatically have one tile of road around them. The road tiles of two neighboring buildings can overlap. This is in itself not a bad idea, but it is very hard to predict if a building will fit into an empty space or not, especially since there is no way to make the game display a grid.

If you have misplaced a house, there is no immediate remedy. You have to build it; then, when it is finished, you can sell it again. Your workers will then dismantle the building, and you will get back part of the original price. Of course, dismantling can be done only during your builders' work hours, so a misplaced building may cost you quite some time.

Once finished, the buildings start to disintegrate ridiculously fast. A mechanics shack should be one of the first things you build. And no matter how many mechanics I hired, I could never get them to inspect the houses properly, I had to check them myself regularily and call a mechanic when needed (having the toilets cleaned is a similar problem). If a building is in poor condition, guests will refuse to use it. If the power generator gets in bad shape (it tends to do so right at the beginning), it will produce less energy.

Monopoly Tycoon

Monopoly Tycoon - Business Strategy


Business management game. Buy and sell properties, collect rent, decide how to spend money. The task is to build different kinds of buildings, set prices and rent. Manage your own business. Do certain researches before building anything. There is a great variety of single-player scenarios. The game provides a lot of challenge for players.

Start the game with a definite sum of money in 1930. Invest it in property, railroads, or just build your business. If you are a successful business you may get some information about your competitors. In general, the game is good for entertaining.

The game is focused around city blocks tied to specific colors, not unlike the more traditional Monopoly we all know and (presumably) love. In each block you can build a total of three buildings - electrical stores, newsstands, bars, restaurants, and more. The fourth section of the block is always taken up by an apartment building. Here you can poll the neighborhood to find out what shops residents most want to see built.

Each building can be 1-4 stories, and can be low, medium, or high quality. You can micromanage each business by setting prices, or hire a manager who can sort all that out for you. Periodically new properties come up for auction, and each player has the opportunity to expand his number of blocks to build on.

And that's more or less all there is to it. This setup would make for a fairly simple yet rewarding mobile strategy title if not for a couple of design flaws. The first is that it's almost more difficult to lose than it is to win. After polling the community, just build the three buildings they say they want most, and install managers to run them. Literally all your city blocks will be profitable this way.

Desperados

Desperados - Strategy

Mafia

Mafia - Adventure


I have my own sweet memories attached to Mafia, but even otherwise that its one of the best games i have played till date. I used to play this game way back in my college days surrounded by my friends, ho used to enjoy it like a real story. As it progressed I found myself totally immersed in to story, and started getting the feel of the character. Nothing emotional just trying to describe the realism of the game, created by true to life graphics and involving story.



Its a car drive game at times, and suddenly it becomes a first person shooter. Or all of a sudden it gets a third person action game. There are different variations in the game that everybody will enjoy. You can steal a car, drive a cab picking n dropping passengers, or carry on with your mission. The whole game is setup in a city called "Lost Heaven". After months of driving and following the same roads, I started to get the feel of a real city. I used to easily locate the way without looking at the map later on.


Mafia is set in the 1930s, between the fall of 1930 through to the end of 1938, during Prohibition. The game is set in the fictional American city of 'Lost Heaven' (loosely based on New York City and Chicago of the same time period).


The player takes the role of taxi driver Thomas (Tommy) Angelo, who, while trying to make a living on the streets of Lost Heaven, unexpectedly and unwillingly becomes involved in organized crime as a driver for the Salieri crime family, led by Don Salieri.


Through the events of the game's story, Tommy begins to rise through the ranks of the Salieri 'family', which is currently battling the competing Morello family, led by the sharply-dressed Don Morello.


Eventually becoming disillusioned by his life of crime and violence, Tommy arranges to meet a detective in order to tell him his story, to be given witness-protection, and to aid the detective in the destruction of the Salieri crime family. The 'Intermezzo' chapters of the game depict Tommy sitting in a cafe with the detective, relating his life story and giving out important pieces of information at the same time.


Well I used to play it on weekends and it went on for 2 months. And that was great time of my life. Am eagerly waiting for the sequel for this. Looking forward to old times again.

The Road to El Dorado

The Road to El Dorado: Gold & Glory

Well the game is totally based ont he movie "The Road to El Dorado". Its hard to decide which is more fun. Personally I had played the game first and then saw the movie so for me it was fun every single bit of it.


The story begins in a seaside Spanish town, where a pair of bumbling con men, Tulio and Miguel, discover their faces unceremoniously featured on a "wanted" poster, which even they can figure out means it is time to move on. Tulio is a schemer with an overactive imagination and lust for fortune that makes him the perfect partner for Miguel, who is more the adventurer looking for glory before gold.


As the player, you will alternately assume and control the characters of Tulio and Miguel, who often require you to work with them in a sort of teamwork approach in order to meet the many challenges and avoid the numerous traps in the game.

Starting in the Spanish town's marketplace, where you will need all of your guile and luck to escape capture by the town officials, you will come into possession of a map that seems to illustrate a route to El Dorado.


Well ... the fun, humor, and discoveries are just beginning as you move on to new worlds of adventure from the brig aboard Cortes's ship to the jungles of South America and eventually stumble into the magical city of El Dorado, where you will find that life is not as simple as you might have wished and you are drawn into the scam of a lifetime.

Along the way, the lives of Tulio and Miguel will be complicated by other characters that they meet, including Altivo, a proud war horse, Tzekel-Kan, the high priest of El Dorado, and Chel, a beautiful native girl, who's a bit of a con artist herself. There is always a lot of humor to balance the nonstop challenges of the puzzles and the traps that you will encounter, and it is evident that in order to succeed you will need to have the skill to play as Tulio and Miguel in a teamwork fashion.


So ... as Tulio and Miguel strive to fulfill their dreams of gold and glory, their friendship will be tested, and they will eventually discover that the fate of El Dorado will be determined by their stealth, wits, and actions.

Can they outwit the schemes of Tzekel-Kan and the fierce Stone Jaguars? Will they save El Dorado from the plundering of Cortes? What will happen to the treasured gold of El Dorado?


I found the story to be captivating, and there are many features in this game that made it a real joy to play, but I would be remiss if I did not report that Gold and Glory: The Road to El Dorado is easy to moderate in difficulty and also quite short in the time that it should take the average gamer to complete the game. I consider myself to be a plodder when it comes to game play, and I was able to finish the game in about six hours, clearly a personal best for me with regard to brevity of game play.

Post Mortem

Post Mortem

Syberia II

Syberia II - Adventure Game


Syberia II improves upon the first game by introducing more realistic character animation. This game is not a sequel to the first game, but rather a continuation or second chapter. The game includes a recap of the first chapter, so therefore does not require the player to have experienced the first game. Sokal's latest adventure game Paradise has no connections to Syberia but does use the same high quality artwork and a similar interface.


Syberia II continues the adventures of American lawyer Kate Walker from the first game as she abandons her increasingly stressful life in New York in order to accompany an eccentric inventor to a remote land in Russia known as Syberia where surviving remnants of prehistoric mammoths still live. But unknown to Kate, her controlling employer isn't about to let her just disappear on a wild adventure.
Kate begins at a small frontier town called Romansburg, and continues her journey to Syberia with Hans.


Much of Syberia II is spent talking to the denizens of the world. You'll meet tons of interesting and quirky characters, including the lovably neurotic automaton Oscar, but the protagonists are hardly involving. There’s a lot of backstory involving Kate and her reasons for leaving her life behind to follow Hans that should be intriguing, but she’s an awfully bland person and doesn’t seem to have any characteristics other than being an American and a woman. Hans, too, the nutty old inventor you spend the entire first game chasing after, comes off more as an craggy lunatic who’s following a dying dream.


Enough said already, just enjoii the game. I wont spoil the fun by telling the story further.

Syberia

Syberia adventure game


Syberia is a 2002 computer adventure game conceived by Benoît Sokal, developed by Microïds and published through The Adventure Company.


It is a third-person, mouse-driven, semi-realistic/semi-surrealistic adventure game in which the player must solve various puzzles and follow certain procedures in order for the linear storyline to proceed. As a pure graphical adventure game, Syberia follows the guidelines first introduced by LucasArts : It is impossible to die or to get stuck at any moment in the game, which allows the user to fully immerse him/herself in Syberia's universe without the fear of making a mistake or the constant need of saving the game.


The game contains a dramatic subplot, conducted via calls received on Kate's cell phone, involving Kate's deteriorating relationship with her fiancé.


In the game, the player controls the actions of American lawyer Kate Walker, who is sent to a remote European village in order to finalize the take-over of a toy factory there. Once at the village, Kate learns that the woman who owned the factory has just died, and that she has a brother who must be contacted in order for the takeover to proceed. Her mission takes her across thousands of miles, and leads her to question her own lifestyle.