For the uninitiated, this is Gazillionaire 3:
The bad art is part of the Gazillionaire experience.Gazillionaire are a business strategy series of games by LavaMind, some people who also made Zapitalism and Profitania, both of which I have had much less experience with, but I am sure they look equally terrible. Pure profiteering: that is the nature of the game, and it is both fun and educational, teaching you the virtues of intimidating your crew into accepting pay cuts and sabotaging other businesses!
The games themselves are pretty old: the games came out in the late nineties, early 2000s, back when shareware was still cool. I spent a lot of time playing them on my school computer labs, which I would always manage to download and install them on. I nearly got into a fight with a boy over this game at age seven.
It was great.
LavaMind has recently launched a
Flash version of the game, though you'll have to register for an account to play and save your games and you still have to cough up $20 for the full version. (seriously lavamind? it's been seventeen years.) Its interface has been improved, though the art is still unchanged. You'll think they'll hire one good artist to redraw them, but apparently that's too hard.
Enough talking about how much the art sucks. Time to get started!
This decides how long the game will go on for: when your total assets equal the number you selected at the beginning, you win the game. Conversely, if your debts equal that amount, you lose.
The difficulty affects how much money you start off with, the debt you owe Mr. Zinn, your financier, the interest rates of that debt, and the intelligence of your AI opponents. From Beginner onwards, you will start off with no money.
Pretty obvious. It'll just be me.
You can randomise the planets that your game will have: each planet has a certain planet special that you can use while on the planet that is related to its 'function'. For example, Nosh is the main fuel supplier of the system, so you can buy fuel for much cheaper than on other planets, while Pyke is the home of a famous ship engine manufacturer, so you can upgrade the speed of your engines, allowing you to use less fuel while travelling between planets and allowing you to scoop deals on buying or selling commodities.
Self explanatory
Each ship has different statistics and has advantages and disadvantages: some, like the Locomotis (train shaped ship with inexplicable flames coming out of its end despite being in space) are well-rounded ships with no clear disadvantages while the Worm Shuttle (it looks what it sounds like) is more disadvantaged than other ships.
Because I'm generous, I'll let you guys decide what difficulty, length, company name and ship to use! Planets are purely a matter of randomisation and should not affect things that much, but I'll keep Pyke in because ship engine speed upgrade is soooo gooood.
