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Flesh420

Tycoon Games

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Perhaps this has been posted, but what is you peoples favorite Tycoon/Business game(s)? My favorite would have to be the recently discovered Open Transport Tycoon (http://www.openttd.org/en/download-stable) that's a recreated gem of Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon. I was blown away first by the quality of that game, considering it's completely free, and second by the features. It's extremely fun and addicting building a transport empire. Probably the first time in a long while I've had that 'childhood fun' while playing a game, and it'll be played for many years. I always skimmed past it when searching for a new and good business game, thinking it wasn't really my thing. Boy was I wrong.


So what are your favorite Tycoon games, if any?

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Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. I've poured hours into that and have made some totally insane parks. I can link them if anyone is interested, I got one with over 7,000 guests, which if I recall is the absolute max the game will allow.

I think the only tycoon game I didn't like was RCT3, because it made no sense. Your park could be 3 squares of pavement and guests would just come flooding in - That dumb nonsensical crap never happened in 1 and 2. Just another case where graphics aren't everything.

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I used to play with Roller coaster Tycoon alot, unfortunateley I lost the disc before I could figure out how to save properly.

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Zoo Tycoon. All the way. With the good mods, you could create some very beautiful looking Zoos. Never could get into the second one, if only because it always ran slow if the park got to full and I lost the disk after having the game for a couple of months.

And while it didn't have Tycoon in the name, Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis was a good park builder, too.

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Having only ever played Rollercoaster Tycoon 1, I'm gonna go with Rollercoaster Tycoon 1. That game is endless fun, actually makes me want to boot it up (cheap guy on GOG.coom these days) since I have not played it in a while.

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Oh man I could write a book on Tycoon games. I've played the best to worst. Ones with graphics and ones with none. I've made some for the lolz. I've got a heap of tycoon games to still try. I'm sure they'll be awful.

Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 & 2 are and will probably be at the top of the list. There's even some sort of transportation tycoon from the same guy with the same style. It was playable. Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 was god awful. I bought that sight unseen. I could barely play it.

Prison Architect is awesome. I have had a lot of fun with it. It gives you goals and challenges, but you chose them. It doesn't force you to do anything. You see your employees go to work and your inmates move, so I guess maybe tycoon game + RTS? Its what I feel what Towns should have been.

Game Dev Tycoon is really popular and I'm not sure why. It has clean simple graphics and you get to go from the Comedore Age into the future. The big problem that I found with the game is you know what will happen. Nintendo will always win. There's no sort of replay value. Plus I kept exploiting Gameboy + RPG = extreme profit.

Game Tycoon 1.5 is a pile of shit. So much that I question if its not confused tycoon with point and click adventure. I spent 5 agonizing hours in it trying to figure out what to do, because the tutorial isn't labeled tutorial. Its very cryptic and has a lot of forced waits. I think they have the most realistic system to making a game and running a company.

GameBiz 3 is really complex and very detailed text based management sim. I was into the earlier releases, but this is just too complicated. Plus its old, which doesn't help.

Monopoly Tycoon was fucking awesome. Only bad part was scenarios with the only full start to finish game being an online thing. I used to online vs bots like all day. Since its online there's no save. The game had you building businesses instead of houses.

AeroBiz on SNES was enjoyable as a tycoon game. Making airline routes. Making money. Seeing world events, competing against competitors.

Airline Tycoon 2 is something I conned myself into buying. Its not fun. There's too much bullshit nothing around the actual business. At least you have competitors that you can buy out.

Zoo Tycoon from what I remember was pretty good. Very detailed. Animals would kill other animals.

Wildlife Park 3. Took me 3 hours just to get through all the tutorials. The sandbox scenarios and regions are pretty meh. The graphics are great and there's a good system, but its difficult to get into.

Zoo Park 1 is very easy to play. Like Roller Coaster Tycoon, but with animals. So easy it becomes pointless. You grow your zoo and you grow it and you grow it. You unlock things to improve your animals like mating and stuff like that. Overall it quickly felt like a chore of a game. No scenarios hurt my replay of it.

Farming World I think is the same engine as Zoo Park 1. Very simple to use, very easy to master to the point that I started wondering why? Why do I need to make my farm bigger when I turn a few hundred thousand dollars in profit a year? You have a rival in the game, but he does dick. He can have a far bigger farm than you, but it means nothing.

Sid Miers Railroads! is awesome. I love buying stock in other companies, building railroads, and building factories to make use of everything my trails harvest. Its a lot of fun against bots even if the game is pretty simple and lacks any sort of modes. Its also REALLY crash heavy. Plus you'll laugh at how cities will get buried under 90 tracks.

Total Extreme Wrestling is a text based wrestling promotion management. I've sank many years into the franchise. Its a game of slow progress, even if you dream up stuff and make it happen. You're going somewhere little by little. I've nailed it down to a math formula rather than dreaming up perfect storylines.

Legoland is some kind of theme park maker. I have it somewhere on PC, I never got into it. I just thought ooo the next Roller Coaster Tycoon! Nope. Its very simple for kids.

Music Biz + Chart Wars if I remember correctly are music business simulations. I knew one of the guys that made one of the games. Don't remember which one. Can't remember anything about them. There was also some movie theater sim I played years ago, but I don't remember what it was.

Xenohive where you play as 'THE Company' from the Alien movie franchise as they make money from Xenomorphs. It was a hilarious premise done serious sometime in the mid 90s my friend had it. You need to get a queen, lay eggs, move eggs, keep aliens in line, send them on missions. Game crashed a lot.

Uh Tropico? Does that count as a tycoon game? Its disguised as a village builder. You run it like a business, but there are riots and civil upheaval. I really recommend it. Well mostly Tropico 3 and up. Tropico 2 really took a weird turn being about Pirates.

Uh is X-Com Enemy Unknown a tycoon game? You fully manage a shadowy organization with buildings, networks, employees and so on. Its more than other tactical strategies have.

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Bucket said:

I had a lemonade stand game for my C64.


I had a warehouse management game for mine.

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geo said:

Uh is X-Com Enemy Unknown a tycoon game?

Probably no more so than Syndicate, my favorite hostile corporate takeover with gun-toting cyborgs simulator.

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Lol, SimAnt anyone?

(EDIT: I guess it's not really a tycoon/business game, unless an ant hive can be called a business...)

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Jurassic Park Operation Genesis

Just a fantastic game. it is just like roller coaster tycoon with dinosaurs instead of rides. It really is a shame it costs so much.

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Kirby said:

Having only ever played Rollercoaster Tycoon 1, I'm gonna go with Rollercoaster Tycoon 1. That game is endless fun, actually makes me want to boot it up (cheap guy on GOG.coom these days) since I have not played it in a while.

As I recall, rct2 is basically identical but with more ride types. There's even a way to import all the parks from rct1 into rct2, so you don't have to miss out on any content.

I hadn't played for years until about 6 months ago, and fell in love with it all over again. I think it might be time to build another park soon..

Oh, and stupidbunny, I remember simant being way fun. It's been at least 10 years, though.. I'm curious to try it again.

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Malinku said:

Jurassic Park Operation Genesis

Just a fantastic game. it is just like roller coaster tycoon with dinosaurs instead of rides. It really is a shame it costs so much.


It's weird how much it is. Went to Gamestop a few years ago and found a real beat to shit and back copy: $50 bucks. Almost all of the Jurassic Park games are pretty rare and expensive.

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Of all the games with "Tycoon" in the title, I only lost hours of sleep toplayed the Railroad Tycoon series. 3 is probably the most playable (and the only one I have installed right now) although I spent most of my high school years playing the original and there were parts of 2 that I really liked. (Especially the scenario to build from New York to Chicago in a certain amount of time, where the trick was to build through Canada. This one was easy for me as that particular railway still ran through my hometown at the time.)

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StupidBunny said:

Lol, SimAnt anyone?

(EDIT: I guess it's not really a tycoon/business game, unless an ant hive can be called a business...)

Oh man, Sim FUCKING Ant! I used to play that so much back in the day, that was a really fun game too. True, it's not really a tycoon game but it's still very enjoyable.

I remember as a kid for the longest time I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to populate the other tiles. Then when I learned you had to have Queens, I still didn't know how to change production to get them!

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I've played probably hundreds of hours of Rollercoaster Tycoon. Nothing even comes close. I have RCT2 but I had some trouble getting it to work properly on a computer manufactured in this decade.

The most impressive thing about RCT is that Chris Sawyer wrote the entire game in assembly - he's some sort of genius, surely.

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Roller Coaster Tycoon was one of the games I pirated, then bought, then bough the expansion to and now bought on Steam for $3.

Anyone want a Doom Tycoon where you manage marines and creatures as a business? Could even have forum user names as marine names.

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JPOG is awesome. I keep that game installed and there's a community patch that adds allot of stuff. Rollercoaster Tycoon Deluxe ruled. It's pretty cool how that style of GFX has aged so well, the style is kind of refreshing when you play these games nowadays.

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Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 was such a disappointment that I gave it away, but RCT2 is still brilliant. Also love Open TTD and have spent countless hours in multiplayer. The only downside is (on relatively flat terrain, at least) it's too damn easy to make a metric shit-ton of money, particularly with planes, so you have to mod it to make it harder. None of the default settings make it challenging enough.

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Theme Hospital, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, and the classic Sim Tower.

Also does Black & White 2 count? You don't have to play it as an RTS until pretty late in the game where it sort of becomes necessary (And the expansion didn't seem to be very "passive" friendly either). Either way I sank a good 80+ hours into that gem at the very least. Mentioning it makes me want to try it out again, and also yearn for a number 3. Godus seemed sort of similar but I don't think it would scratch quite the same itch. Molyneux is the kind of genius that doesn't torture himself but everyone else.

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