All Work and No Play… Review

All Work and No Play…

Do you dream of starting your own business? Do you ever feel the
urge to bury the competition through shrewd business acumen and
stock market savvy? The designers at Interactive Magic are
hoping you do.

Capitalism Plus has several enhancements over Interactive Magic’s
original Capitalism. They have added a map and scenario editor,
SVGA graphics, and have significantly increased the overall
complexity and detail.

The game is a very well thought-out and detailed business
simulation. You start each game with $10,000,000 and 50%
ownership in a company. From there, you chose a company name
and logo, as well as your own name and a clip-art portrait.
Capitalism Plus allows the player to farm crops, raise livestock,
mine and process minerals, import
goods, manufacture goods, and sell products at retail. You can
also research new products or better ways of producing existing
ones.
Capitalism Plus lets you chose marketing strategies, buy and sell
stock in all companies, and pay dividends from companies you
control.

Advanced strategy gamers
will enjoy the level of control available. Unfortunately, this level of complexity
requires you to manage every little detail, and beginning players may feel a
little overwhelmed. If you build up a large business empire, it will require
constant attention to prices, stocks, and research and development to keep on
top.

If you do feel a little overwhelmed at first, there is
a full set of tutorials to introduce you to all the basic game
concepts. The addition of a narrator was obviously an attempt to liven up the
tutorials a little which are fairly boring and
reminiscent of a economics or business lecture.

The high level of detail which makes this game such good
simulator of business makes it very demanding of your attention
during play. As prices for all commodities rise and fall, your
costs as well as your competitors’ prices change constantly.
Computers are much better able to react quickly to changes in prices and
technology and can adjust their prices and strategy endlessly
without becoming bored. The human player, on the other hand,
usually gets pretty sick of adjusting the price of 20 products
for the umpteenth time to stay competitive and maintain a profit.

The problem is that the computer has the energy and patience
to oversee as large a business empire with as much attention as
it
wants, while humans (like ourselves) have only finite patience for dealing with the
minutiae of supply and demand, inventories and prices.

Graphically, the game is
on par with other modern strategy games, except that it seems to lack the production
values of the more popular strategy games. The game screen is unusually static.
There are no pieces to move around and no animations to see. For all the effort
this game requires of the player to maintain and expand a business, there is
little payoff. The day to day operations of your company are represented by
little pie charts and bar graphs. It would be nice to be able to see what is
going on in your facilities, but Capitalism Plus represents all your
facilities as organizational charts.

Running a business is what many people do as their job.
This game is a good simulation, however, that doesn’t
make
Capitalism Plus a fun game. It does have its moments. The first
few
quarters of game time are pretty fun. Unfortunately, after that,

the constant attention required to maintain your business usually

outweighs the fun of expanding your empire and market control.

I would recommend Capitalism Plus to three groups of people:
people who dream of starting their own business, students in
business school who yearn for a game to bring their lectures to
life, and hard-core strategy players who have a lot of patience
with
micromanaging things. For the casual strategy player or someone
who
demands bells and whistles in their games: you’d be better off
investing elsewhere.