Mall Tycoon
Quick reference
Verdict: How could anyone work on this game? How could anyone approve it for release? How could anyone buy this? When you think of all the great games that could be made, the fact that money was wasted on this one is mind blowing.
The good:
The bad:
Install
When the logo first popped up I thought "wow, this is going to rock so much more than Airport Tycoon." The graphics looked better, the concept was new to me, and the install was fast. Nothing makes me happier than a fast install (or uninstall). The game takes about 200MB once installed, and the CD doesn't have to be in to play. This is a strong advantage: once a buyer plays the game they will quickly throw the CD away. On that note, there is also no form of copy protection (key or otherwise); I'm guessing this is due to the fact that the game sucks so strongly that the only people that would give this game out are people who want to hurt their friends' mental state. If you happen to receive this game from someone, do yourself a favor and give them a nice swift kick in the junk.
Pre-play look-see
Being the geek that I am, the first thing I do when I get a game/application is play with it's installed files. I was surprised at what I saw with Mall Tycoon - easily editable files! This is a major plus for the game, as users can painlessly mod the game (the pain comes when you play it) without finding tools or reverse engineering the format themselves. Looking at the different file formats it's easy to tell one of two things: the developers wanted to help foster a community of game players that would help them extend the game's life through mods and tweaks, or the developers were lazy fucks. From experience, I am guessing it's the latter: no amount of modification could salvage what follows.
Opening
I have two major gripes with opening the game. First off, the thing is too damned slow to load. Not only is there nothing to load, but what is loaded is crap. On a sufficiently new system pulling off a 2x7200rpm RAID0 array this thing should take seconds, if that. It's not like the files are compressed/encrypted, and it's not like they are that large. Since there is no real LOD besides removal (I'll get to that in a second), it can't be that it's generating mipmaps or calculating LOD's for geometry. Secondly: The only explanation that I can find for the loading is that they wanted to scroll loading lines like the Sim games. Hell isn't the one in that screenshot even from the Sims? Seriously - nothing pisses me off more than overtly slow and unnecessarily loading times. Why make your users wait to play something so crappy? Or is it part of the "experience?" *sigh - calm down......*
Choices
One of the nicer (I guess) features of the game is that you have a choice between scenario mode and free play. I usually do free play in every game that gives me an option (and loathe those that don't - just think how cool Black & White would have been if it was all free play!), but in this game they make it too hard (more on that in a second). I went with a scenario, which they provide plenty of, just to have something to play with.
Graphics
This is a big deal for me - games like these almost require decent graphics. I'm not talking great graphics (no Doom3 or HL2 here), but something better than ass. Would so many people have played the Sims if each person was a bright neon pink smiley face floating above the ground? No, because it would have been lame. The same goes with this game: the mall you build will always look horrible no matter how hard you try.
Let's dissect this a bit more: The first shot is of a lingerie store. Not overly hideous by itself (ok, so it is), but made hideous by the yellow blob standing within. In game there are few animations; they must have wasted all their efforts on this chic, because the animation of her lifting that pair of panties up in the air over and over and over again is sooo much better than everything else in the game. *tries to turn off sarcasm* Besides the models ugliness (and lack of things like say shadows and shading), the biggest issue is that the mall-goers are dwarfed by her and the store. Each patron is a 2D sprite; it's kind of understandable in that if someone ever played this game they may have more than 5 people on the screen at once and a few thousand 3D models would kill performance. However, that does not give the artists lease to create horrible 2D people! From what I can guess they are Poser models rendered in a few directions (I guess poser because it's almost obviously what was used in the loading screen and other dialogs). Take a gander at the shot in 'Gameplay' of the thief - they wander around like zombies with their arm stretched. Come on guys, try a little. The sense of scale is totally whacked. I wish I could have gotten a better screenshot before I uninstalled the game, but basically each patron is about half her size - barely standing as tall as the counter next to her. This just looks pathetic - either scale down the models or scale up the people. Finally, the LOD in the game is horrible. As I mentioned before there is no discernable attempt to perform LOD besides removal of objects from the scene graph. No mipmaps, scaled down geometry, or anything that would make sense besides shitty graphics. Even then, with just their camera-distance based culling, they do a horrible job. All of the 2D graphics are alpha blended (the nice transparency effect), yet they don't take full advantage of this. Look at the second shot - those are two pictures (spliced) of the camera zoomed in and then pulled back a bit. Where did the tree go? Poof! The ugliest culling I've seen since 1998. Since they were already doing alpha blending they could have just scaled the alpha value with the camera distance and created a neat looking fade effect. That way when you are moving around your mall or zooming things wouldn't just pop in. Apparently fundamental graphics rendering is beyond these guys.
Gameplay
Not much to say here as it doesn't really exist. Games of this genre (management/god sims; like Sim*, * Tycoon, etc) don't really need a set storyline or consistent gameplay mechanics, they only need the feeling of them. The emotions that arise from these kind of games are what makes them such good sellers - nothing feels better than creating something and watching it prosper. Unfortunately, Mall Tycoon does a horrible job of this all important task. Not only is the process of building the mall a pain in the ass (slow, hard to navigate the menus easily, etc), watching it run is quite uneventful and boring (read: crappy graphics). After starting with a nifty scenario and placing a few lingerie shops (I picked them for the screenshots because they look the worst) only one patron came to my mall. She walked in (from nowhere - there are no parking lots), walked into the store, and left 2 seconds later. Get this though: with only one patron, I had about 20 "punks" and more thieves than I could count. I don't know what punks do besides maybe vandalize, and the thieves are just damned annoying. Sure there is nothing really to steal, but they walk like fucking zombies. Why would I want to sit there for 20 minutes watching mowhawk-ed "punks" (I am only guessing they are mowhawks, I can't really tell because the graphics are so bad) and thieves? I guess the answer is I wouldn't, as seen in the thrilling conclusion!
Conclusion
I chose yes. Luckily the uninstall was as fast as the install was. Good riddance. And again, the fact that several games were not made so this one could be is depressing - the state of the industry will turn with either lots of cuts and closings or reinvention of the way ideas are materialized. When companies can pass shit like this through you know something is wrong, and I hope that one day independent and small developers can get a cut of the funds sunk into something like this to make a game that is worth playing.