Holiday Island

The Good
The Sim-foo games have always been fun for me. Add something here, try something there and see what happens. Well, this looked like an interesting sim-ish game to try.

While Holiday Island is fun to play for a while, it gets old fairly quickly. There is just something missing that the Maxis games (some of them, anyway) just right. There are a lot of different kinds of buildings that you can build in several different categories ranging from shops and attractions to hotels and airports. You can play with up to 7 AI players, though they sometimes don't really play well.

Another one of the interesting things in this game is that you can sabotage your opponents efforts. Things like bribing the construction crews so their buildings take longer to build, putting pirahnas in their swimming pools, greasing airport runways... you know, fun stuff. Unfortunately, these don't always have a very profound effect, despite their steep costs.

The Bad
On the downside, everything seems to cost an arm and a leg, though it could just be my perception, as everything is in the British Pound. As mentioned above, the AI leaves something to be desired, and some things that you build and do really don't seem to impact anything.

The Bottom Line
Overall, this is a fun game for about 15 mintes. Then you need a real vacation.

The Good
I enjoy the sim-city style games, and this one has been a favorite of mine since the mid '90's. It's fun formatting the islands to get them in the shapes you want (using the money cheat), and challenging to get the sims to move into the places you create for them.

The Bad
I have the "abandonware" version. One time (only once) I managed to get the auctions to come up, but then the game hung on one day. I still haven't found a users manual for it yet.

The Bottom Line
There are some things I have learned, though. DELETE key spins the map. To save your game, choose save, then type the name and press ENTER.