Here's the deal: A-IV, the most powerful multinational conglomerate in the world, has a secret, one which you are about to be let in on.
A-IV's CEO, Dwight Owen Barnes, has died in a mysterious plane crash - or so it seems. Turns out that his disappearance is has been faked. In a video e-mail, he reveals to you the secret behind A-IV's success: Every so often, it replaces its head honcho with someone new, untried - and unpredictable. This gives A-IV its edge and keeps the company from stagnating. After 25 years, D. O. Barnes has reached that point, and it's a convenient time for him to vanish anyway (his apparent death will drive the price of A-IV's stock down, thwarting a possible hostile takeover).
So how does A-IV find a successor for the supposedly late Mr. Barnes? Simple. One of their software divisions concocts a simulation of running the company, which is supplied to select candidates for the position. Hence, the line which appears below the title on the box: "The world's most powerful job is open - your application is enclosed."
Sound like a cool idea for a financial strategy game? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Far more interesting than the usual "You're a greedy bastard out to ruin your competitors and keep all the money for yourself" non-premise found in so many financial games. There's even a contest, which will probably be almost over by the time you view this episode, where you can transmit codes indicating your high scores to I-Motion (by dialing up to a 900 number, naturally). Whoever submits the best score will win $5,000. This is really ingenious. If only Ben & Jerry's had thought of it . . .
Unfortunately, the game starts going sour moments after the end of the extremely cool video intro. (Quick aside: why did Artdink/Infogrames go to the trouble of creating an AVI player for DOS when they could just as easily have written the game for Windows? It's not like WinG hasn't been available to developers for over a year now, or anything.) I have to confess that I never got very far in the game, because neither the game nor the manual ever bother to explain what the goal of the game IS. To make money, ostensibly, but how do you go about doing it? This is never made clear.
The interface is a total mess. There are too many controls which you have to click open and shut on three of the four sides of the screen. Worse, if you have panels open on all sides, they can cover each other up, obscuring useful information. Despite this, the controls are pretty straightforward, if obscure. In order to remove a piece of forest, for example, you've got to go to the Build menu, choose Various, select the forest tile and the Remove option and click the square you want to clear. The game's inability to distinguish whether I wanted to place or remove a tile drove me nuts; it seemed to set the controls at random in order to deliberately frustrate me with error messages. My monitor came within a rat's whisker of demonstrating to the locals the meaning of the word "defenestration."
Once you get past the interface, it IS possible to lay some track, build stations and so forth, but what's the point? There's no feeling of accomplishment to any of this, no immediate feedback that you've done a good thing, no sudden influx of cash. The most marked effect I've been able to have on a game in progress is that whenever I put another train on an existing track, it inevitably crashes with a train that's already running there. (Don't even think about trying to assign a route to a train. It'll give you heartburn.)
You should be able to make money the old fashioned way - by swapping stock - but this assumes you can catch the exchange when it's open (Duh?). That's right, if you don't click the stock market button quickly while the clock is between 9 AM and 5 PM, you can't get in. Same for the bank. (Sorry, but somehow I think that for a client of A-IV's supposed stature, the president of Chase Manhattan would get out of bed at 3:00 in the morning if he had to.)
Ultimately, the problem I have with CEO: A-IV Networks is that it concentrates too much on being realistic and not enough on being fun. If I wanted to go to all the trouble in this game, I'd buy my own damn company and run it myself. Then I'd get to spend the REAL money I REALLY made. Or lost, as the case may be.
