|
|
|
|
Vega$ Tycoon Vega$ Tycoon is a budget game with some big aspirations much like the casino clientele Sin City is known for. Superficial gameplay and a nonexistent story plague this cheap iteration of the much more forgiving Casino Empire. While you do get to build the Vegas strip up from nothing to the bustling throughway we imagine it to be, the path to a successful casino is wrought with frustrations and complications, and in most instances a bewildering fluctuation from the city’s most loved resort to a ghost town literally overnight. Starting with a small plot of barren land the player is tasked with meeting certain objectives in each scenario but the outrageously demanding public coupled with an unintuitive user interface and no real charts or demographics it becomes apparently impossible to figure out where you’re going wrong. Unless you’re really into gambling or the casino scene, Vega$ Tycoon is best avoided like a chronic gambler should avoid the cash advance desk at their favorite gaming hall.
Score: 5/10Developer: Deep Red
Released: 2004 Genre: Simulation, Management Official Website: N/A Visit Instead: Vega$ Tycoon |
Graphics:
For the first few hours of playing, while your ears get assaulted from the constantly looping, crappy sound effects, your eyes will get to feast on the lights, glitz, and glam of the Las Vegas strip as you slowly breathe life into the heart of the desert. Your casino comes with its own unique look and all the buildings you are able to place to complete your entertainment resort have their own distinct feel and outrageous amounts of neon lighting. The entire look of the game is cohesive and for the most part well designed.
Human models are low polygon cash carriers with, creepily, no faces. As I played I wonder how they were able to get around my casino with no eyes; however, I was able to figure out why they could only grunt seeing as they had no mouths either. From a distance the humans wandering around look good enough and each type of gambler has their own distinct look making them easy to distinguish as they clump together around your casino table games. High Roller gamblers are dressed in white cocktail dresses and Sad Drunks are slouched over and stumble their way through your gambling den.
You also get to choose the overall theme for your Vegas-inspired resort. “The House of Zeus” is reminiscent of Caesar’s Palace and “Gambler’s Pair o’ Dice” is replete with cheesy Vegas tropes, and your choice dictates the style of statues, fountains, and plants you can place about your casino and your exterior grounds. They all function the same way across all themes, but they are at least unique to their palette and are rendered with enough detail that they really do give your casino a feel of its own. As you continue to play the game though you are forced to look at the same stuff over and over and as long as you place the requisite buildings inside your casino you have access to everything. The exterior of your casino has almost everything unlocked for you from the start expect for the casino signs. You must have a large hotel to place the largest sign with the most powerful neon you’ll ever come across in video games.
Though the character models are low resolution meat bags, thankfully you’ll spend most of your time looking at your opulent (or dingy, depending on what aesthetic you’re going for) casino and all its trappings. Fountains bubble with admittedly fake looking water effects and some statues and signs have moving bits that add a bit of visual flair. The overall look of the game is awash with neon lights, blinking marquees, and little people who wander about your complex. The graphics aren’t anything spectacular but they’re consistent and just enough to keep you playing. It’s about the only thing particularly good about this game, however, as everything else about this budget
title falls apart around the seams that the graphics use to keep the whole mess together.
For the first few hours of playing, while your ears get assaulted from the constantly looping, crappy sound effects, your eyes will get to feast on the lights, glitz, and glam of the Las Vegas strip as you slowly breathe life into the heart of the desert. Your casino comes with its own unique look and all the buildings you are able to place to complete your entertainment resort have their own distinct feel and outrageous amounts of neon lighting. The entire look of the game is cohesive and for the most part well designed.
Human models are low polygon cash carriers with, creepily, no faces. As I played I wonder how they were able to get around my casino with no eyes; however, I was able to figure out why they could only grunt seeing as they had no mouths either. From a distance the humans wandering around look good enough and each type of gambler has their own distinct look making them easy to distinguish as they clump together around your casino table games. High Roller gamblers are dressed in white cocktail dresses and Sad Drunks are slouched over and stumble their way through your gambling den.
You also get to choose the overall theme for your Vegas-inspired resort. “The House of Zeus” is reminiscent of Caesar’s Palace and “Gambler’s Pair o’ Dice” is replete with cheesy Vegas tropes, and your choice dictates the style of statues, fountains, and plants you can place about your casino and your exterior grounds. They all function the same way across all themes, but they are at least unique to their palette and are rendered with enough detail that they really do give your casino a feel of its own. As you continue to play the game though you are forced to look at the same stuff over and over and as long as you place the requisite buildings inside your casino you have access to everything. The exterior of your casino has almost everything unlocked for you from the start expect for the casino signs. You must have a large hotel to place the largest sign with the most powerful neon you’ll ever come across in video games.
Though the character models are low resolution meat bags, thankfully you’ll spend most of your time looking at your opulent (or dingy, depending on what aesthetic you’re going for) casino and all its trappings. Fountains bubble with admittedly fake looking water effects and some statues and signs have moving bits that add a bit of visual flair. The overall look of the game is awash with neon lights, blinking marquees, and little people who wander about your complex. The graphics aren’t anything spectacular but they’re consistent and just enough to keep you playing. It’s about the only thing particularly good about this game, however, as everything else about this budget
title falls apart around the seams that the graphics use to keep the whole mess together.
Sound:
Like all the other aspects of this game the sound is merely okay. Nothing is strikingly out of place save for the horrible elevator music that constantly loops whilst playing. Think of every casino you've ever been inside and you get the soundtrack for Vega$ Tycoon. Slot machines generate copious amounts of noise and if you zoom the camera in close enough you can hear the reels spins and the machine generate its compulsory beeps, bells, and whistles. As the crowds begin to gather in your gaming hall you hear their excited murmurs and whimpers of frustration as they either leave with pockets flush with cash or empty handed.
The sound is ultimately forgettable and you will most likely find yourself turning the sound way down or off completely. I’d rather have my teeth drilled than listen to the same cheap music over and over again. Though nothing in this department is so awful it’ll make your ears bleed, it’s more annoying over a long stretch of time. You can only hear a keno machine beep and hum so many times before you reach for the volume dial. The same goes for your clientele; if I had to suffer through one more poorly recorded groan as they lost another two hundred dollars to my high stakes tables I would have tossed my computer speakers onto the front lawn.
The only saving grace to the sound of Vega$ Tycoon is that the music and sound effects all fit the part. The only thing missing from the sound banks of this game are the gunshots that’ll be heard as your blow your brains out trying to slog through this budget title. It’s a shame that all the puzzle pieces don’t come together for this game. Being the head of a conglomerate casino should be challenging and fun, but the fun quickly slips out of your grasp as the sound devolves the other relatively well designed aspects of the game. Where the sound will have you plugging your ears with cotton balls, the graphics are passable enough to at least keep your eyes in their sockets.
Like all the other aspects of this game the sound is merely okay. Nothing is strikingly out of place save for the horrible elevator music that constantly loops whilst playing. Think of every casino you've ever been inside and you get the soundtrack for Vega$ Tycoon. Slot machines generate copious amounts of noise and if you zoom the camera in close enough you can hear the reels spins and the machine generate its compulsory beeps, bells, and whistles. As the crowds begin to gather in your gaming hall you hear their excited murmurs and whimpers of frustration as they either leave with pockets flush with cash or empty handed.
The sound is ultimately forgettable and you will most likely find yourself turning the sound way down or off completely. I’d rather have my teeth drilled than listen to the same cheap music over and over again. Though nothing in this department is so awful it’ll make your ears bleed, it’s more annoying over a long stretch of time. You can only hear a keno machine beep and hum so many times before you reach for the volume dial. The same goes for your clientele; if I had to suffer through one more poorly recorded groan as they lost another two hundred dollars to my high stakes tables I would have tossed my computer speakers onto the front lawn.
The only saving grace to the sound of Vega$ Tycoon is that the music and sound effects all fit the part. The only thing missing from the sound banks of this game are the gunshots that’ll be heard as your blow your brains out trying to slog through this budget title. It’s a shame that all the puzzle pieces don’t come together for this game. Being the head of a conglomerate casino should be challenging and fun, but the fun quickly slips out of your grasp as the sound devolves the other relatively well designed aspects of the game. Where the sound will have you plugging your ears with cotton balls, the graphics are passable enough to at least keep your eyes in their sockets.
Gameplay:
Most of your time with Vega$ Tycoon revolves around placing your casino and then filling it up with machine and table games for your patrons to play. Set your stakes and your house advantage, place some plants or fountains, add a bar and buffet, and that’s about the basics of building a successful casino. Once you’re satisfied, or out of cash which will probably be the first thing to happen at the beginning of each scenario, you’ll move to the outside of your casino and begin using all those gambled away dollars on signs, decorations, restaurants, bars and a whole slew of other entertainment options for your guests. Your second most important revenue generating building will be your hotel and, much like in the real world Vegas, the bigger the better. You don’t have any control over your hotel except for setting the nightly rental price and adding some upgrades such as a bellboy or high roller suites. They serve no real function other than to attract the most wealthy casino patrons to spend the night and rest up for more hours of losing money to your cash hungry greed machine.
Building is easy enough as you basically select what you want from a confusing menu of services and place them within your property lines. Make sure your guests have walkway access to the front door, set the price, and you’re good to go. But it’s not that easy. Guests avoid your buildings and while there is a list of complaints they almost never seem to amount to much information. You’ll never really know if the venue is too expensive, or so popular it’s full to capacity forcing your walking money bags to search for something else. And your casino is almost always unpopular and you’ll mostly never know why as the graphs don’t give the player any real information. Is the place too stinky? Not enough game types? You’ll never really know why so you’ll most likely dump more money into the heart of your operation in hopes that the unknown damage will be undone and the masses will flood through your doors once again. In my time with Vega$ Tycoon I found that once you’re known for having an unworthy casino the guests never come back in time for you to meet the scenario objectives forcing you to start over.
And this is where the main gameplay of Vega$ Tycoon comes totally crashing down. If you lose the scenario you have no choice but to start everything from scratch. The first few failures aren’t a total loss. You’ll search for different methods to achieve your goals and in the early game a few small tweaks are usually enough to get you to the finish line first. Later in the game the difficultly jumps from merely annoying to crushingly impossible as the other property owners you’re competing against must have magical powers that attract all the tourists. It seems that no matter how you approach the last few scenarios you’re almost always poised to lose even if you start strong and have a huge lead. As you watch the victory conditions slip out of your grasp you being to formulate your next moves when you restart the scenario. The problem here is that there is no way to save your casino as a template so upon each restart you must place your casino all over again and this could mean spending an hour or more getting everything just right. And everything, and I mean everything, in Vega$ Tycoon is placed by hand. You can’t simply set your wager limits and house advantage and drag out a line of slot machines a-la Casino Empire. Here, you must place each machine individually and manually change the parameters for each one. It’s tedious and good only for developing carpal tunnel syndrome. It takes the joy out of the game quite quickly and I found myself playing for short periods before becoming so frustrated with the obtuse menus and lack of any real knowledge on how to improve my resort. I could only place so many casino games and adjust the parameters only so much before the game quickly was consumed in micromanaging instead of critically planning my casino and watching the guests drop their every last penny into my pockets so I could further expand my resort. Without knowing what they wanted or how to give it to them, my guests became sniveling trolls out to besmirch my gold mine of a casino that I had spent hours constructing and lovingly placed amenities for them.
There is no undo button and if a mistake is made you must sell the offending object at a loss. When using your precious starting cash too many mistakes will lead you down the road to debt and there is no loan option to get you over the hump. You’re also unable to see the negative and positive effects of the different objects you can place until they’re in the game world. While you may think garbage cans scattered around your casino floor is helping your visitors by reducing litter thrown on the floor, they add to the negative smell effect and upset rather than please your customers. You can sink a huge gaping hole into the ground of your casino floor thinking the noise will not bleed out but it ultimately does and then upsets everyone walking past. And once your customer is upset by the noise the chances are your casino rating will be chipped away to nothing. While the game overall pays attention to detail most of those details are unimportant and counterintuitive. You’ll be desperately making adjustments but nothing you do ever seems to be enough to get yourself back on track.
Most of your time with Vega$ Tycoon revolves around placing your casino and then filling it up with machine and table games for your patrons to play. Set your stakes and your house advantage, place some plants or fountains, add a bar and buffet, and that’s about the basics of building a successful casino. Once you’re satisfied, or out of cash which will probably be the first thing to happen at the beginning of each scenario, you’ll move to the outside of your casino and begin using all those gambled away dollars on signs, decorations, restaurants, bars and a whole slew of other entertainment options for your guests. Your second most important revenue generating building will be your hotel and, much like in the real world Vegas, the bigger the better. You don’t have any control over your hotel except for setting the nightly rental price and adding some upgrades such as a bellboy or high roller suites. They serve no real function other than to attract the most wealthy casino patrons to spend the night and rest up for more hours of losing money to your cash hungry greed machine.
Building is easy enough as you basically select what you want from a confusing menu of services and place them within your property lines. Make sure your guests have walkway access to the front door, set the price, and you’re good to go. But it’s not that easy. Guests avoid your buildings and while there is a list of complaints they almost never seem to amount to much information. You’ll never really know if the venue is too expensive, or so popular it’s full to capacity forcing your walking money bags to search for something else. And your casino is almost always unpopular and you’ll mostly never know why as the graphs don’t give the player any real information. Is the place too stinky? Not enough game types? You’ll never really know why so you’ll most likely dump more money into the heart of your operation in hopes that the unknown damage will be undone and the masses will flood through your doors once again. In my time with Vega$ Tycoon I found that once you’re known for having an unworthy casino the guests never come back in time for you to meet the scenario objectives forcing you to start over.
And this is where the main gameplay of Vega$ Tycoon comes totally crashing down. If you lose the scenario you have no choice but to start everything from scratch. The first few failures aren’t a total loss. You’ll search for different methods to achieve your goals and in the early game a few small tweaks are usually enough to get you to the finish line first. Later in the game the difficultly jumps from merely annoying to crushingly impossible as the other property owners you’re competing against must have magical powers that attract all the tourists. It seems that no matter how you approach the last few scenarios you’re almost always poised to lose even if you start strong and have a huge lead. As you watch the victory conditions slip out of your grasp you being to formulate your next moves when you restart the scenario. The problem here is that there is no way to save your casino as a template so upon each restart you must place your casino all over again and this could mean spending an hour or more getting everything just right. And everything, and I mean everything, in Vega$ Tycoon is placed by hand. You can’t simply set your wager limits and house advantage and drag out a line of slot machines a-la Casino Empire. Here, you must place each machine individually and manually change the parameters for each one. It’s tedious and good only for developing carpal tunnel syndrome. It takes the joy out of the game quite quickly and I found myself playing for short periods before becoming so frustrated with the obtuse menus and lack of any real knowledge on how to improve my resort. I could only place so many casino games and adjust the parameters only so much before the game quickly was consumed in micromanaging instead of critically planning my casino and watching the guests drop their every last penny into my pockets so I could further expand my resort. Without knowing what they wanted or how to give it to them, my guests became sniveling trolls out to besmirch my gold mine of a casino that I had spent hours constructing and lovingly placed amenities for them.
There is no undo button and if a mistake is made you must sell the offending object at a loss. When using your precious starting cash too many mistakes will lead you down the road to debt and there is no loan option to get you over the hump. You’re also unable to see the negative and positive effects of the different objects you can place until they’re in the game world. While you may think garbage cans scattered around your casino floor is helping your visitors by reducing litter thrown on the floor, they add to the negative smell effect and upset rather than please your customers. You can sink a huge gaping hole into the ground of your casino floor thinking the noise will not bleed out but it ultimately does and then upsets everyone walking past. And once your customer is upset by the noise the chances are your casino rating will be chipped away to nothing. While the game overall pays attention to detail most of those details are unimportant and counterintuitive. You’ll be desperately making adjustments but nothing you do ever seems to be enough to get yourself back on track.
Final Thoughts:
Vega$ Tycoon is sadly just a bad game and I really wish it wasn't because it could have been great. The sound is a constant loop of annoyance rather than a pleasant soundtrack that accompanies you, the graphics are utilitarian with a patina of neon light effects to cover up the ugly, and the engine beneath the hood that dictates if you win or not is not tuned and unresponsive. For a game that’s this inexpensive you know you’re not in for a blockbuster, but some of the design choices are totally inexcusable.
It’s one thing to have a lot of options but Vega$ Tycoon takes the definition of the word and runs miles with it. I shouldn’t have to manually adjust every single game in my casino; it’s painstaking enough just to get the different floor heights matching up let alone single handedly constructing every nook and cranny. Also, the unpleasant factors of noise and smell, which are odd inclusions to begin with, never seem to be fully masked no matter how many flowers and fountains you throw at your casino patrons. They always complain and it seems no matter what you do you can never make them happy enough to come back or be good walking advertisers spreading the respectable word about your business.
It’s as if the game is always against you rather than being a simple good challenge. A hard game is one where you have a good chance of winning with a little forethought and a solid plan. Vega$ Tycoon is an impossible game as it seemingly cheats you out of a victory that you know in your heart of hearts you should have obtained. The stupid graphs contain information but none of it is useful in any meaningful way that helps you understand where you’re going wrong and why nor does the game offer up any real apologetic way of dealing with a losing scenario. It basically says “You lost sucker! Dump another four hours into me so you can lose again! No matter what you do I always win idiot! Welcome to Vegas bitch; the house always wins!” It’s a shame too as Vega$ Tycoon could have been a fun game if the difficulty was leveled and fair. As it stands you have a better chance of having some real fun at a real slot machine in Las Vegas than placing twenty-six hundred of them and then manually adjusting each one in Vega$ Tycoon. If you’re a hardcore Vegas-freak or slot junkie then you’ll probably find something worthwhile buried in all the trash of this game. For all other players looking for some light-hearted casino fun, head over to Casino Empire; I hear they have the loosest slots in the genre.
Vega$ Tycoon is sadly just a bad game and I really wish it wasn't because it could have been great. The sound is a constant loop of annoyance rather than a pleasant soundtrack that accompanies you, the graphics are utilitarian with a patina of neon light effects to cover up the ugly, and the engine beneath the hood that dictates if you win or not is not tuned and unresponsive. For a game that’s this inexpensive you know you’re not in for a blockbuster, but some of the design choices are totally inexcusable.
It’s one thing to have a lot of options but Vega$ Tycoon takes the definition of the word and runs miles with it. I shouldn’t have to manually adjust every single game in my casino; it’s painstaking enough just to get the different floor heights matching up let alone single handedly constructing every nook and cranny. Also, the unpleasant factors of noise and smell, which are odd inclusions to begin with, never seem to be fully masked no matter how many flowers and fountains you throw at your casino patrons. They always complain and it seems no matter what you do you can never make them happy enough to come back or be good walking advertisers spreading the respectable word about your business.
It’s as if the game is always against you rather than being a simple good challenge. A hard game is one where you have a good chance of winning with a little forethought and a solid plan. Vega$ Tycoon is an impossible game as it seemingly cheats you out of a victory that you know in your heart of hearts you should have obtained. The stupid graphs contain information but none of it is useful in any meaningful way that helps you understand where you’re going wrong and why nor does the game offer up any real apologetic way of dealing with a losing scenario. It basically says “You lost sucker! Dump another four hours into me so you can lose again! No matter what you do I always win idiot! Welcome to Vegas bitch; the house always wins!” It’s a shame too as Vega$ Tycoon could have been a fun game if the difficulty was leveled and fair. As it stands you have a better chance of having some real fun at a real slot machine in Las Vegas than placing twenty-six hundred of them and then manually adjusting each one in Vega$ Tycoon. If you’re a hardcore Vegas-freak or slot junkie then you’ll probably find something worthwhile buried in all the trash of this game. For all other players looking for some light-hearted casino fun, head over to Casino Empire; I hear they have the loosest slots in the genre.