It's late fall here in New England, and that means a couple of
things. Firstly, it means raking - lots and lots of raking. Like a
ticker tape parade, tons people come up here to look at the
leaves, but when the party is over, who's left to clean it all up? My
wife and I, that's who, and we're seemingly responsible for fully
half the maple trees in southern NH. Secondly, it means that it's
time to get ready for ski season. Now, for those of you in other
parts of the country, or the world, you may have a picture of skiing
in your heads. A picture in which people shush down a crystalline
slope of deeply-fallen powder or sit in hot tubs drinking hot rum
toddies with mountains in the background. Here we have the
drinking down pat, but your picture of skiing has clearly been
colored by satellite feeds from Colorado and Nevada. No, skiing in
New England is a different animal altogether, as many days the
temperature creeps above freezing, turning the mountain into a
slurry of slush and ice, only to freeze absolutely solid with the
coming night. The next morning, the groomers come out and
chop the ice into a base with the consistency of pea gravel, and
then the sun rises and it starts all over again. Part luge run, part
highway construction project, skiing up this way is an experience
all to itself, but I'm a hardcore ice skier through and through, and
I'm up here waxing up my skis and checking to make sure my
crutches are in good shape for the coming season. The final
annual late fall rite is the dozens of local newspaper stories
debating which regional ski resorts will re-open this year after
having declared bankruptcy at the end of last season. As I'm
paying $40 a lift ticket and $6.50 for a hamburger at the lodge, I
can't help but wonder just how hard could it be to run a ski resort
to a profit, anyway? Now is my big chance to find out with Ski
Resort Tycoon.
On the surface this game looks a lot like Rollercoaster Tycoon, but
as you dig down you find a game that still looks a lot like
Rollercoaster Tycoon. But even underneath that appearance lies a
deeper one, and there you will find an almost complete lack of
differences between Ski Resort Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon.
All right! Who the hell do they think they are kidding? 'I'm Clark
Kent.' 'No, I'm superman!' Hello? Duh! You could peel back
layers all the way down to the Marianas Trench and it would still
be a lot like Rollercoaster Tycoon. The layout of the game is much
the same, with buttons across the top of the screen for building
new lifts, terraforming, buying buildings, landscaping, and the like,
along with game controls like zoom in, zoom out, save game, etc.
The rest of the screen, the lion's share, is devoted to a view of
your burgeoning ski resort. You start each level with a mountain,
some cash, and some goal you are trying to achieve. See?
Almost exactly like Rollercoaster Tycoon, only instead of
rollercoasters you have ski runs. It's a difference, but is it enough
to carry a whole separate game? Well, the gameplay is a little
different; I'll give it that.
For starters, laying out a ski resort is a lot more restrictive than an
amusement park. The mountain has a sloped part (the mountain
itself) where the runs have to go, and a flat part near the base
where you build all the support buildings - food, maintenance,
equipment rentals, bathrooms, and hotels. Almost immediately I
had to be careful about how I was laying out a rope tow, because
it occupies some of the flat building space at the bottom, and it
cuts a line along the mountain slope where I'm going to be unable
to build a ski run later. I felt a need to come up with some master
plan - a black diamond here, a bunny slope there - to make the
most of my mountain. This is in sharp contrast to an amusement
park where you can build pretty much anything anywhere there is
space for it. I would usually just kind of drop rides and
concessions as they occurred to me - though maybe there are
hardcore players who also come up with some amusement park
master plan at the beginning of a new park. As I see it, the
flexibility of designing your own coaster lets you squeeze one in
over and under and around other rides. A ski run has to go
downhill, or maybe across the mountain slope for a short distance,
and it can't go over or under a building and it can't go where a lift
is, etc. I think you get the idea.
The other gameplay facet that makes this different from
Rollercoaster Tycoon is that there isn't any researching of new
rides or concessions. In its place is a construction tree - some
things can only be built after other things have been. That,
combined with the fact that the more advanced structures also
generally cost more, guides somewhat the way in which you can
build up your ski resort. This is more realistic (I always found it
odd that you had to research to have bumper cars in your
amusement park in RCT as bumper cars have been kicking around
since at least the 1920's), but I can't decide if I like it better or not.
It does give the game a kind of Civilization feeling which would let
you build a marketplace only after a granary had been built, etc,
blurring the lines between a sim game and a 4x. Now if there was
just another ski resort next door that you could attack and take
over…
The one part of the game, which I felt would be a problem going
in, was how to determine by sight how steep a hill is or what kind
of a run it will make. I had visions of numbers all over the hills (as
in RCT) indicating how high each point was above zero ground,
and having to trace lines through all these numbers in my head.
The designers handled this more elegantly than I had expected by
giving you a surveying tool. You drag a line between two points,
and it tells you the slope and how difficult the rating for a run
along that line would be. Using the tool it is a breeze to set up
your mountain with the good mix of beginner, intermediates, and
expert slopes necessary to win your park, uh, resort, a good rating.
The game also has a good variety of stuff you can build - jumps,
half pipes, several lift styles, and many different hotels,
restaurants, and added attractions such as an ice-skating rink,
bowling alley, or cinema. More stuff than frankly I see at ski
resorts in NH or VT. I went skiing once at the Sierra Ski School in
Tahoe, and I don't recall it having a bowling alley either, but that
was like 10 years ago so maybe it has one now. The mountains in
the game are quite large giving you a chance to construct a large
and varied resort.
The graphics, predictably, are comparable to those found in
Rollercoaster Tycoon. The vast majority of the mountain could
have appeared as stark, eye-blasting white, but the designers
wisely chose to use shades of gray copiously to tone it down some
and help you see the slope of the hill better. Skiers wear bright
colors, and the trees are pleasant shades of green and brown
(when they're not covered with snow). In an odd addition that
parallels the less-than-successful Sim Theme Park from Bullfrog,
you can climb inside the head of one of your guests and see the
resort from their eyes as they ride a lift or ski down the mountain.
You can't control where they ski - you're only along for the ride -
and the graphics for such an undertaking are less than stellar
making its entire inclusion kind of bizarre. Perhaps it's there to
help differentiate this game from Rollercoaster Tycoon. That it
does, but not for the better. Sounds are the big disappointment as
you don't hear much besides the clatter of the machinery and the
shush of the occasional skier. I'm so used to the laughing, music,
and general festival atmosphere of Rollercoaster Tycoon, that this
is pretty drab by comparison.
The only real headache of the game - the only place that I can
point a definite finger and say that this should have been done
better is the ski patrol. A customer gets hurt on the mountain, and
he's lying there in the snow yelling for the ski patrol, and where
are they? Who knows? I'm not sure they do. You can't grab the
workers in your resort like you could in Rollercoaster Tycoon and
just drop them where the trouble is (you could also grab customers
in RCT and frankly that was a little unrealistic, but it was fun,
especially dropping them in the water and drowning them). So
the ski patrol is just sort of out there looking for the injured
customer, but they look everywhere, in seemingly no particular
order. People are skiing past the injured person - you'd think they
would notify the ski patrol where they are. Apparently not. The
ski patrol spends a lot of time looking around in the woods far from
the trails and not where they need to be, and I've had people die
of hypothermia waiting for them. Yeeeeh.
I think, given that winter is almost upon me and I enjoy skiing, it's
sort of a kick to lay out a steep ski slope and watch my customers
fall on their faces (not as much fun as piles of puke building up
outside an intense rollercoaster, but fun nonetheless). The
question remains will non-skiers be entranced enough to allow Ski
Resort Tycoon to reap the same marketing gold that Rollercoaster
Tycoon accumulated? I'll leave that decision to the game
reviewers. Oh, wait, that's me. Well, I've been listening to me a
lot lately, and here's what I've been saying: I'm not ready to quit
Rollercoaster Tycoon for a play-alike game that I feel is ultimately
kind of seasonal (I don't expect to be interested in planning a ski
resort in August). It's not a bad game, and maybe hardcore skiing
and RCT fanatics can add 10 points to my rating, but as a whole I
believe Ski Resort Tycoon is the answer to a question no one
asked.
By: 
