Corporate Raider: The Pirate of Wall St.

The Good
This is probably the earliest stock market computer game there is out there and probably one of the closest stock market simulations imitating the real thing. Or not.

Corporate Raider: The Pirate of Wall St. has a very simple concept: Buy stock, get rich. In this game, getting rich doesn't seem to be very much of a problem which is quite odd. If real-life were as easy as buying stock in this game, anyone would be a millionaire in no-time, all you need is $100.000 to start off...

The game play itself is pretty self-obvious. Incoming news on the left screen, stock market symbols on the right screen with its prices. Buy stock, hopefully that lucky stock you bought will go up...

Played the game for a couple of hours, although the game play itself (you actually touching the keyboard) is only a couple minutes long. Most of the time you just wait for time to go by and see if the prices change...so most of the time you can just leave the game on and check out the prices later on.

The Bad
Nice idea as a simulation. Bad idea as a game. Although the idea of realism the game tries to represent as a game is intriguing, it's a flop as game. Any game that requires waiting more than game play is already digging its own grave.

Each "turn" e.g. waiting for the price to change or in real-life: each business day, takes 2-3 minutes (or more) long, waiting for all the prices to list itself from A to Z. I lasted probably 4-5 prices changes (making myself a nice million dollars) when boredom eventually struck me. I really would have liked to play more, but the game didn't require much of my attention, thus lost most of my interest.

I never got into the part of hostile take-overs and such, since it took to long for prices to change. Oh well.

Other little things I noticed was that news had little or no affect to stock prices. One would think one would buy stock that the news reported positively. I tried that tactic...didn't work very well. I eventually just bought stock that had high and positive marks. Any stock in the game that goes up more than 3 points per turn is likely to stay that way. Even if it does go down to minus, you can sell it at that turn and you'll still have a hell lot of profit. Easy money. It just takes to long.

Last thing, is that you can't read old news (the scroll option wasn't invented yet). So if you missed something, you miss it good. You can't go back to see what the information was. Kinda lousy since real-time stock market kinda depends on that kind of information. It's like trying to read a newspaper of someone passing by.

Nice try though.

The Bottom Line
Not worth the play, but worth the knowledge if you want to know a thing or two about the stock market (just the basics though...nothing complicated).