Casino Tycoon (Monte Cristo, PC)

By PETER ELEY

(Herald rating: * * * * )

The word casino has a certain glamour, with associations of Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, and exotic people wealthy enough to drop a million or two without losing sleep.

Smoky rooms lined with 20c pokie machines are nearer reality, and probably contribute more to a casino's bottom line than the likes of Kerry Packer.

You can find out just how a casino works in the well-constructed sim, Casino Tycoon. It was an obvious choice for a sim — we've had just about every other imaginable.

The game starts with an empty casino and you have to build it up to profitability. You don't have much capital, so you have to manage things and slowly add facilities such as bars and restaurants which in turn attract more customers.

If you don't add these facilities quickly enough, the customers start whining and looking for other places to gamble away their hard-earned cash.

You get a top down, sort of 3-D view of the floor. Initially, your clients play the pokies and you use revenue from these to employ blackjack dealers, roulette croupiers and pit bosses.

You'll also need a hotel to house profitable add-ons such as gift shops.

The business model seems sound and once you set up the casino properly, the money rolls in steadily. You can sit back and watch your bank account swell while those of the hapless punters shrink.

That is the Casino Tycoon's problem. It is too organised and sterile, probably much like the reality of the casino business.

It could have done with a few mobsters and a dose of organised crime to spice things up.

Challenge mode offers some variety, among them catching petty crooks such as pickpockets and card sharks. Secret cameras spot dodgy behaviour and you then send in a snatch squad to throw out the offenders.

The graphics are ordinary, although few sim games boast cutting-edge visual effects. The plus side to this is that the game runs on a Pentium 233 and 64mb ram, quite modest specs by today's gigahertz chip standards.

peter_eley@nzherald.co.nz