First of all let me say this. This game is good. Very good. Not really hard, I suppose, when you consider that it's based on an all time classic—Transport Tycoon Deluxe. The original game was created by Chris Sawyer, commonly regarded as a game creating genius. His games have stood the test of time amazingly well, holding their own in gameplay terms against many newer games.
For those of you who have been living under a rock for most of your (gaming) life, I'll explain. Transport Tycoon is about making money with transportation. "Duh", right? Well, the best ideas are often the simplest.
You start off by controlling a company with a loan of £100,000 and the option to borrow more (how much depends on the difficulty level). Your mission is to make as much money as possible by transporting all types of items from place to place. You can take coal to the power station, wood to the sawmill, passengers and mail from town to town, and so forth. There are various options, and each map is different. There are four types of landscape, each with its own cargo and vehicle types.
Transport Tycoon really comes into its own with vehicles. Trains, road vehicles, planes, ships... the choice is yours.
OpenTTD takes this formula and expands upon it, while keeping the spirit of the original intact. OpenTTD is a full re-write of the original Transport Tycoon code, made in C using SDL (although that doesn't really matter unless you're a programmer) and it is
open source. This re-write features a whole host of improvements upon the original, fantastically expanding the gameplay and keeping the game fresh even after all these years. You can get new graphics sets for the game also which allows you to completely replace everything in the game, including all the vehicles.
I even played a replacement set recently that made one of the landscapes into Mars!
OpenTTD is currently at version 0.4.0, so it is still being worked on by the project's many contributors, but don't think that means it isn't complete! This version has lots of improvements over the original game, and is updated to run on today's most common systems. It can run on Windows XP, Mac, linux, OpenBSD, you name it, there's probably a version for it. Hell there's even a version for pocketPCs!
As this game is still in version 0.4.0 it requires some files from the original game to play (the graphics files). This means that a copy of the original game is required for play to be possible, but buying the original would only cost you about £10 at the most. (check out
www.amazon.co.uk or
www.ebay.co.uk—should be easy to find a version at either). There are plans, however, for all of the graphics to be replaced so that the game is made standalone (i.e. it doesn't require you to buy another game to play it). Im not sure of the timeline for this, but it'll probably be in version 0.5.0.
Check out
www.openttd.org to get this great game!
Larger versions of the screenshots are here:
http://www.alternativenation.net/gal...?i=41848&c=889 http://www.alternativenation.net/gal...?i=41849&c=889 http://www.alternativenation.net/gal...?i=41850&c=889
