Fortune Builder

Description

Once there was a game called 'Lemonade Stand' on the Apple IIe. In it the game told you how much it cost to buy lemonade, and you could set the price to sell. A day might be rainy or hot, affecting the maximum inventory you could sell, and after a bit your mother would stop giving you free sugar. The strategy to maximize money got obvious quickly, and you only made a few bucks a day. Then some friends at school showed me a ColecoVision and the crown jewel of their cartridge collection, Fortune Builder. And I'm still jealous they had that to grow up with.

In Fortune Builder(FB) you have five years(thirty minutes of actual time) to build your fortune to $250 million. You have four different skill levels to start at: the harder the skill, the less money you have to start with. At the later levels you are pretty much forced to take out big loans to build up your empire quickly, and the bigger your loans, the higher the interest rates. It's possible to go bankrupt if your net worth drops to zero. In the meantime, though, you need a surprising amount of dexterity and spatial reasoning to keep up with things. The months go by so fast, you know, although not quite enough to be able to play the game in a pinch.

The land you get to develop contains a few islands and a river and even some start-up roads. It's the same every game, but given the number of properties you can place and a 64x24 size that spans a few screens, you can change the dynamics by concentrating on a different sector early each time. It may take some time to learn how to flip through the controls, but the 1-button is for the map, the 2-button chooses your property to place, and 3 takes care of money matter such as borrowing and even selling a property. Once I learned which properties were easiest to access, and when I should flip back through the menu to save time to get to an unseen property, my entrepreneurial juices started flowing. It's something you need to know because the non-map screens take up half the screen so that two-player games can work. The only thing that's really disappointing about the whole set-up is that the unused keys could have been used to hyper-warp across the screen. As it is you take several game-days to move over to the mountains in the northwest. And you're not the one moving, it's your construction companies. You're just delegating.

And what properties you have to delegate! They're divided into three categories: roads. No one of these brings in much money, but they're pretty necessary to get the black dots that appear on the screen as you build more of your city(cars, you see) to enter the properties. Eventually bridges can be used to explore the lucrative islands. Where general properties(condos, apartments, fast food restaurants) are better replaced with resort properties such as a casino, marina or boardwalk. There are also ski lodges and lifts for up in the mountains.

If you're quick enough you can populate the whole inhabitable board with properties, but to do so you need to plan where the roads go and even where you place your big(2x2 icon) and small properties. I remember my friends lambasting their mother for placing a bunch of condos inside a 6x6 square of road where cars couldn't enter. You can just get caught up in the joy of mass production, of beautifying your city, that you even forget to push 5 to relax a moment and view the whole thing or even to make sensible decisions, balancing your properties without losing time switching among things to build.

Price varies with landscape as well and that's just another reason you can't just go slapping properties wherever you feel like it. Certain ones interact well together and others don't. The instruction manual spells this all out, and it almost makes the game seem trivial. Until you realize that a and c interact well with b, but a and c don't work well together. For instance, an apartment by a factory is good news, but factories are bad for everything else including fast food restaurants that could stand business close by. Throw in a coal mine that helps power the factory, and the property value of the area nearby drops further. Certain properties also gain more profit with a change in season, and there's no really good way to isolate how any one property is doing. So the game just gives overall monthly status, which isn't bad considering it's only got 32K of ROM. It will take a while for the game's seeming subjectiveness to burn you out.

Because from that to the random you will find subtle ways to alter your plans. You may see a bulletin at some months' start: 'EXPERTS SAY FAST FOOD MAY CAUSE BALDNESS.'/'NUCLEAR WAR FILM DESTROYS BOX OFFICE RECORDS.' It's pretty obvious what to build in these cases, but that's something else you have to be prepared for. In two player mode, there's apparently one more; a friend offered to play me in two person mode, telling me how profitable ski lodges could be although you had to build them before winter. The roads were easy enough to build and I could do that later.

But I couldn't sell the toll booth and condos they built blocking the only passage to the west, between the river and the mountains, for people to get there. In fact there are all sorts of mean things you can do in two-player mode. All the dumb moves you can make by yourself(place a factory next to a hotel by the seashore) become wickedly possible. As you can win by bankrupting your opponent or making your fortune. There's even a chance for truces--but likely no handshakes. The game's too fast paced to keep your hand off the controller.

Sadly if you go the emulation route the keyboard may get a bit crowded as you tap away against an opponent(who'd be tough to find anyway) but even by yourself FB is a treat to watch develop. You don't have any real enemies and it's a tough balance between making your town look aesthetically pleasing and having it profitable; I often put up with a bunch of factories and coal mines right away before building the luxury stuff and leaving my profitable zones to soak up money. But the greatest touch is watching the black dots that pass for cars rush around your streets and seeing one go into that mall you just built. The first car you see is always exciting--and there are a few(onto the island, into your mountain casino, by your isolated stockpiled campgrounds.) And the land you must develop is a pleasant enough mixture, leaving you with a sense of pride as you drop the pretty buildings on it--although there's a minor nagging question about which half-water icons you can actually build on. Through this all the sound is quite nice. Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons,' or at least one of the more memorable clips from it, cycles continually. It's all a bit big picture without a lot of subtleties, but given the needlessly technological soundtracks these days the tune is refreshing to hear. Except for that time it went through my internal PC speaker at work. But it's even about the right speed to tempo with the tasks you need to do and apparently listening to classical music makes you smarter anyway(you need it for this game.)

Whenever I play FB I admit I look that much more into speculation. It makes a good deal more sense now that I have a six-digit loan of my own and reenforces the viewpoint that my mortgage is an actual investment. Of course I can't throw my real money around as I do in a game, but the planning is all rather seductive, and the simple layout of how many factors can influence a decision, and you can't consider everything before you make a choice, work well. It's encouraged me to try to go for bigger things without delay(to think I once started with just a few podunk gas stations before letting people live places,) just to say I won earlier or at a higher skill level, and I've rarely had a game spill over into profitable real-life situations(I mean, without being a time sink.) And there's no preaching involved, just fake profit and loss. All that and bearable classical music too are a reward for getting through the tangle of button pressing that comes from the half-typewriter, half-console that was the ColecoVision and a game that looked for something different than dry algebra programs or just another shooter or gobble game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/10/00, Updated 10/03/03