Just why are PC games so popular these days? You go to work, spend all day worrying about deadlines, production schedules, and the all-important bottom line. Or you go to school and deal with taking notes, learning things that will help you in business, and trying to justify spending time learning about Cartesian planes and parabolas when you want to be a rock star. After messing around with all of this business and school stuff you want to relax, so you come home and pop a game into your PC. Blow away a few bad guys and you feel much better. But now Interactive Magic has produced a game that blurs the line between what should be fun and what should be work. Capitalism is a financial strategy game that puts the player at the head of a corporation and simulates different business environments as everyone competes to make a ton of money. Isn't this the kind of stuff you do or learn about all day long? Where are the guns, the high-performance hovercraft, the explosions? I mean, how much fun can dealing with stocks, spreadsheets and production lines be?
Well, when talking about the game of Capitalism, the answer is more fun than most of the games I've played. And you don't have to have a real interest in business to enjoy this game, although that would really help. With the way Capitalism was put together, strategy lovers are sure to get into this game as well as corporate CEOs.
The game operates in real time and begins with the player owning a 50% stake of a corporation, and personal money to invest as he wishes. The map consists of different terrains, each with their own advantages and disadvantages - city areas, suburbs, and seaports which bring in goods, both raw and manufactured, to help get you started. The player has a variety of ways to make money throughout the game, including playing the stock market, selling raw materials, producing products and retailing finished goods. The kicker to all of this is that the game is designed so that products in the game can often be combined with other products to make a brand new product. Capitalism gets very involved and complex very quickly.
Actual gameplay is surprisingly easy and bound to be an outline for future game designers. Building a factory, for example, begins with purchasing a piece of land, normally in a suburb area where factories work well. Once the actual building is constructed, workers have to be put into place, and this is where the designers have done their best work. Each building, be it a factory, mine, farm or department store, has nine available "units" in it. Each unit supports a work department like a manufacturing, purchasing or sales department. Each unit can be connected to any adjacent unit, making lines of production possible.
So in our factory, let's say we want to take steel, a raw material, and make engines out of it. First we would set up a purchasing department to buy the steel itself. Next to that unit we'd set up a manufacturing unit that would actually make the engines, then we'd connect the two units. At the end of the chain we'd set up a sales department to actually move the product and connect it to the manufacturing unit. So steel is bought, manufactured into engines and sold through the line of production that's been set up.
Actually, making and selling products is just a part of Capitalism. Each product is rated in three areas: price, quality and brand. Each rating is determined by the market as to how important that area is to the consumer. If a product has a high price rating, then the consumers are going to be more concerned about how much it costs, but if it has a high brand rating, then the buyer is going to be influenced by how much advertising they've seen for it. Getting a higher brand rating involves setting up advertising units connected to sales units to advertise the product. In each city there is usually a newspaper and television station that you can link the advertising unit to, and you can designate how much money a month to spend on advertising. The more money you spend, the higher that product's brand rating will be. Improving quality is a bit more involved, but can usually be accomplished by setting up Research and Development groups. By researching a product, your R&D groups can find ways of improving them, which translates into higher quality ratings.
As involved as Capitalism may sound by my description of it so far, there are many, many more features that I don't have space to talk about. Needless to say, trying to manage all of the factors of your corporate empire, and invest in the stock market at the same time, can get overwhelming. Compensating for this, the designers have thrown in the ability to hire a president to handle the day-to-day tasks of running your empire for you. You can pick from a list of folks to hire, and each candidate is rated in a variety of areas such as advertising, buying from your own companies, and emphasis on R&D. Each person is also rated in areas of expertise like advertising, manufacturing or retail. When you find the person with the qualifications and attitude you want to run your corporation, you can hire them at a pretty expensive salary.
But hiring a president is not the end all of the process. You can delegate them to run all of your firms, or just have them preside over any of the firms you designate. You can also adjust their pricing aggressiveness to match your competitors in overall ratings, set your product's rating to be slightly higher, or arrange things so your product's ratings will be much higher than everyone else's, which will mean a larger investment. Unfortunately you can only hire one president at a time, so having one president in charge of retail and another in charge of manufacturing is not possible. There's also a strange quirk when a president decides to resign and you have to hire another president. It's possible to actually re-hire that same person at a lower salary than when they resign. There are a number of realistic features in this game, but hiring a new president isn't one of them.
Completing the total financial experience in Capitalism is access to more reports and information than I ever could have thought of. Corporate detail summaries, firm summaries, product detail reports, product summaries, manufacturer's index, farmer's index, and much more are all here to use. When you first start playing, unless you do this in everyday life, the sheer amount of numbers will have your head spinning, but after playing Capitalism a while you'll find that you'll be using all of this information without a second thought. There was a lot of attention and foresight put into the design of this game, because any information I ever needed was always available in one form or another.
Attention to the financial intricacies was not Interactive Magic's only concern with making Capitalism. The graphics in this game are very nice, being done in SVGA. Photos of actual factories and stores are used when interacting with your firms, photos of actual people are used as the CEOs of the corporations, and the interface is very attractive. Since you'll be doing lots of staring at the screen, the game is easy to look at and understand throughout. There's not much graphic action going on, but what is done is very pretty.
The development of this game would have been viewed as a lost cause by some gamers. Making a game that makes the complexities of running a major corporation enjoyable sounds like an impossible task. Some similar games like SimCity2000 came under fire for becoming boring after a while, and other games like Caesar II have included combat to break the tedium. Very often, open-ended games like SC2000 make some gamers feel lost and without purpose. It is possible to play open-ended games in Capitalism, but if the game becomes a little more vague than you'd like, various scenarios give specific goals to work towards. For instance, one scenario gives you so many years to get the company running at an annual revenue of so much money. These scenarios provide that structure that some gamers love.
The trouble with trying to describe this game is that for every feature I mention, there are three features that I haven't touched on. But don't worry, because there is virtually nothing bad about this game. There have been enjoyable financial sims in the past, but Capitalism is just plain FUN. I've even heard plans of making a multiplayer game of Capitalism, but right now this is only a single-player game. But if you like games like Master of Orion, Master of Magic and SimCity2000, buying Capitalism is a moral imperative. This should definitely be on any strategy gamer's top ten list.
