Smoky Cogs

When it comes to computer games, I have a particular fancy for railroad business simulators. Now, I am not talking about actual train simulators, like Microsoft Train Simulator, but rather railroad simulators that focus on the business side of things, like Railroad Tycoon, Transport Tycoon and A-train.

That is why,for Christmas this year, I asked Claudia to get me Chris Sawyer’s Locomotion, even though it was in the bargain bin. I simply cannot resist these games.

It all started when I first bought the original Railroad Tycoon way back in the early 1990′s, when I was still a teenager. I absolutely loved that game and played and replayed it endlessly.

Railroad Tycoon

Next up, I got into A-train, which was a seriously addictive, although underrated game. I enjoyed this one even more than Railroad Tycoon. It featured day-night variations, a stock market sim, and a healthy number of subsidiary businesses to build.

A-train

Transport Tycoon is the game that sucked up all my free time when I started university, and a brilliant game in my train-obsessed mind. I have played with the Deluxe version as well as played around with a few open-source ports of this game. It is a game that will never die for me.

Transport Tycoon Deluxe

Railroad Tycoon 2 I enjoyed, and played quite a bit, but, perhaps because, at the time, I was still too much into Transport Tycoon, I never played it to its full potential. It was a decent game none-the-less, and loved playing it.

Railroad Tycoon 2

The one game in this genre that I never fully got into was Sid Meier’s Railroads! It was not a bad game by any account, and I did find it fun, but it lacked the depth that the other games had, and therefore it got relegated to the shelf for times when I had nothing really else to play.

Sid Meier\'s Railroads

Now, though, I get to go and enjoy Locomotion….I know the game might be a bit dated, but considering how much I still love, Transport Tycoon, I am eager to see how it fairs.

If you are old as I am, then you are likely to remember a little game that came out a good number of years ago called Skifree.

You were a skier skiing down a slope with a number of hazards (and bonuses) along the way. The point was to avoid the hazards to get to the finish line in the fastest time.

The graphics are simplistic – even by the standards of the mesolithic when this game was popular, but people seemed to love it.

Enter 2009 and xkcd. The latest webcomic published yesterday features the game, and then something amazing happens. So many people started downloading the game after seeing it on xkcd that it brings a few of those sites down.

The whole of Reddit was abuzz about Skifree.

Then this morning, I noticed that someone had during their lunch hour yesterday decided to write a version of Skifree using an HTML Canvas. It is missing a lot but looks just like the original. The original reddit post I saw this mentioned on is here.

All of this over one game, that happened to be the subject of one webcomic on the internet. Media has certainly changed!

The other night I was playing snakes and Ladders with Cole, and realised what a futile game that is.

Most games tend to be a mixture of logic and luck to varying degrees. Chess and checkers are almost wholly logic (which makes them so much more enjoyable to me), while games like Ludo or Jenga or Monopoly have quite a bit more luck thrown in, but still require a lot of thought to do well.

Now Snakes and Ladders is one of the exceptions. There is NO skill involved at all. The winner is solely determined by who gets to the end first based on what numbers you throw on a dice.

It is pretty much a kids version of playing the slots in a casino. I don’t see any thrill in winning a game where you have no control on the outcome. Winning just means you got lucky, and says nothing at all about how good you are.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, of all the games I play with Cole, he loves Snakes and Ladders the most….

I absolutely love The Movies, and even though I know the game is a few years old already, I find it still incredibly fun to play.

One good aspect of The Movies is that it is very easy to change almost any feature in the game by modifying the data files found in the Data\Pak folder. By putting one of the modded configuration files in the Data folder makes The Movies use that instead of the file found inside the pak file.

There are also a host of custom made movie sets available for download all over the internet. some work better than others, but they do provide a nice variety to the built-in sets.

One word of warning before you begin. These mods have the potential for completely ruining the gaming experience for you.

So, here is my list of great The Movies mods and utilities. Just click on the links to download them.

Pak Poker
This is THE most useful utility of all. It gives full access to all the files stored in the pak files, which in turns allows you to modify any of them to tailor-make your game.

The Employees mod
The employees mod gives you a heck of a lot more people lining up in the lines for each building. I found this useful since, especially when my stars started demanding an entourage, there just weren’t enough people.

Increased lot size
This little mod gives you a bigger lot size, which greatly helps in placing buildings in the game, since the default lot size is way too small for my liking.

If you would like to play with the values, I have found that in the first 3 values after [size] give the width and height as pairs of numbers. The second number of each pair can be pretty large, but my game crashed when trying to increase the first number, so be warned.

Experience mod
This mod gives all your employees a lot of experience.

Mood mod
Do you want all your stars to be in a good mood? This mod helps keep their mood good.

Social mod
This lets your stars increase their relationships much faster. I found this useful as I found in the unmodded game, this usually takes very long to improve.

Ground mod
This mod increases the attractiveness, and the speed at which people walk over various types of ground.

I cam across a link to a rather frustrating, yet completely addictive game, Funny Farm.

The game is divided into 25 “maps”, and you start with only the centre map available. The them for the centre map is “on the farm”, with each map having a different theme. Starting at the centre, there are a number of blank vertex coming off it – much like a mind-map, with dots representing the letters of the words that go there.

The aim of the game is to guess which words – related to the word in the adjoining vertex – which belong in each vertex. As you find more words, more vertices become available, and as you find words on the edge of the map, then the adjacent maps will become available too.

If you want a little help to allow you to get some sleep, have a look at this forum at Nordinho.

However, before you venture forth to this game, I absolve any responsibility for lost hours .

Web technology has come a long way, and browsers are finally becoming fast enough to do a little bit of gaming.

JSNES is a NES emulator written by Ben Firshman, in Javascript, that will run on most browsers. A word of caution though – Javascript in most browsers is too slow to run JSNES with any real playability, although, Google Chrome, with its lightning fast Javascript engine runs this application without a problem.

For those of you who are too young to remember the NES, which stands for Nintendo Entertainment System, was the grandfather of today’s consoles. It was an old 8-bit console introduced in 1985, and was all the rage back then, and was the platform that launched the stardom of the Super Mario Brothers.

There is a small selection of the good old favourites available to play on the site.

I grew up playing Monopoly, and have over the years seen various electronic incarnations of this classic game. Monopoly City Streets though, has to be the biggest monopoly ever.

Rather than the normal 28 properties that you can buy and develop in the traditional game, just about every street in the world becomes a potential street that you can own, and then you can build buildings on them. The more buildings, the more income you get and the more you can buy, with the end goal of becoming the richest player in the world. You also get chance cards that can either help you some way or hinder your opponents.

Like most online games though, it is likely to get boring pretty quickly, as it is not a particularly deep game, even though it does require a little bit of strategy to master.

So, here is to a little empire-building…