I was looking forward to PowerHouse. I like business games, and Impressions makes pretty good ones. They've been getting a bit, shall we say, formula of late, and PowerHouse is no exception. That's not to say it isn't a fun game, but you can really see the room for improvement.
It's like this: "Business simulation where it's you and three competitors? Oh, this must be an *Impressions* game." Come on, guys! In the real business world, companies appear and disappear - at any given time, a market will likely have one or two 800-lb. gorillas, some mid-sized companies, and countless tiny start-ups. It sure would be nice to play a business game that captured that feel realistically.
Okay, enough sermonizing. PowerHouse is an ambitious venture into uncharted waters for the strategy game company: it's their first Windows game, their first game to incorporate digitized video, and the best-looking Impressions game to date (bearing in mind that this game was released a couple of months ago, before their recently-released - and even better-looking - Caesar II).
PowerHouse's underlying model is intriguing. You control the fate of a PowerHouse, one of four competing energy-producing conglomerates. You make money by building power plants and selling the output to the government of the territory where the plant is located (or, if you are producing a surplus, stored in capacitors or funneled into a transformer network to feed other territories). The world is divided up into around 50 such territories, and you can only build plants in territories which have been "opened" by the UN. At the start of the game, only one territory is "open," so it's basically a race between you and the other three companies to fulfill that territory's needs.
You can opt to build any of nine different types of power plant: coal, oil, nuclear, natural gas, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, solar, or wave. Each type has its pros and cons. Fossil fuels, for example, tend to be quick and cheap sources of cash, but pollute heavily. You can ignore this fact, and simply plunder away, but ultimately, environmental fines will begin cutting into your bottom line. Sources such as wind and solar don't yield as much per investment cost, but neither do they cause as much damage to the environment. Your means of extracting energy from these various sources can all be improved through investment in R&D. Each has ten different levels of technology; improvements make your operations cheaper to build, more efficient, or less polluting. This works well, although I certainly wish there were some way to get feedback on the progress of your scientists.
To kick off the game, you're given a lump sum of capital and a territory to supply with energy. You dispatch survey teams to scout the territory for viable plant sites. This costs money - both salary for the survey teams, and fees to the territorial government for permission to conduct the survey (happy happy, joy joy!). Once you've found a viable location, you must construct the site. Each site can have up to ten "rigs," each of which is a single oil drilling platform, windmill, solar array, etc. which increases the output of the site. Coal and natural gas need to be fed to a generator to produce energy (which can be accomplished by an invisible "truck and rail network" or by building pipelines), as must oil, which must also be refined.
This is a great model, made comprehensible by the fact that the designers blew off using conventional measurements of power-supplying industries (barrels of oil, tons of coal, kilowatt-hours of power etc.) in favor of a generic "unit" of energy, a yardstick by which all sources are measured. Unfortunately, they then turned around and established that different types of power plants pay their bills (maintenance and operation costs) over different periods - some monthly, others bimonthly, others annually. Oops. This means that comparing the cost-effectiveness of different sources demands some mental gymnastics. ("Okay, multiply this one by two, divide the other one by twelve - or was it the other way around?")
My other big problem with the game was the complete and utter lack of a "capacity" value for fossil fuel sources, refineries, generators, transformers, etc. Partway through the game, I began to get incomprehensible "problem site" reports from a couple of my refineries, for which there was no help in the manual or through technical support. I contacted the company directly, and after speaking to someone who knew the game well, determined that the reports meant that I was shipping too much oil to the refinery for it to handle. It seems my oil well had hit a gusher and overwhelmed it . . . now, perhaps it's just me, but when a single refinery can't handle the output from a single well, that seems like a major game balance problem. Anyway, I was advised to improve the technology of my refinery and to build additional rigs to increase the capacity they could handle. This I did, and despite maxing out the rigs the site could handle, my output of refined oil did not increase. Nor did the damned error messages go away. This could have been rectified had the designers seen fit to put a "refining capacity" value on the site info panel. Then, when I added rigs and improved the technology, and the capacity didn't increase, I could call them up and say "Hey, your software's broken. Fix it." As it is, I don't know exactly what the problem is, so I'm just frustrated. This could really have gotten me down on the game, were I not such a perky and upbeat person by nature.
One of the big complaints I've had with Impressions games in the past has been with their interfaces. Detroit, a game which I really enjoyed, just got too tedious for me after a while. It felt as though I had slipped through a time-space vortex into the Land of One Thousand Clicks and a Click. Thankfully, PowerHouse's interface is better, though not perfect. One big gripe, which I really shouldn't blame them for, but will anyway, is that the main window of the game doesn't overlay the task bar in Win 95. If you start without the task bar set to "auto hide," it actually obscures part of the icon bar. Since the main method of scrolling the map is to push the mouse pointer into the screen border, if you DO use auto hide, it's virtually impossible to scroll down by normal means. Thankfully, they DID build in other ways to move the view around, so I can't gripe about that one too much. Still, I hope they release a patch to fix this problem - or, better still, a native Win95 version.
Good things about the interface include a customizable icon bar - single-clicking an icon brings up a particular report, so you can have all your favorite reports readily at hand. Also, adding sites to a map square is simple in the extreme: select the site type from the information panel on the right of the map view and left-click on the map. Right-clicking a site brings up site information. Almost perfect - all that would make it better would be for spinner buttons, such as the one that lets you hire and fire scientists, to repeat. As it is, if you want to hire 50 scientists, you've got to click a spinner button 50 times. Finally, for some inexplicable reason, certain pop-up message boxes caused the background screen to turn into a nasty dark mess, although this didn't really interfere with the game, and very well could have been peculiar to my system or to Win95.
One last thing that bears mentioning is PowerHouse's use of digitized video. I think it's great that Impressions is trying to bring their titles up to current technological standards, but it really falls short in this case. The video playback is chunky, even for the relatively small window used; the bluescreen work is clumsy, with lots of artifacting around the edges of the actor; and the acting is downright awful - particularly in light of the excellent newscast video used in Adair & Armstrong's In the First Degree (published by Broderbund).
Overall, I liked PowerHouse, but a couple of minor things grated on me, which spoiled the fun of the game somewhat. In general, though, it's a solid design that strategy fans should be able to milk for a little entertainment. If you're interested in business games - particularly if you're an old-time fan of the "wildcatting" games which inspired it - you'd do well to have a look at PowerHouse. It's certainly an improvement over Impressions' previous releases, and you could do a lot worse.
