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Reviews: MacSoft's Monopoly
MacSoft’s implementation of the classic boardgame Monopoly is fairly true to the real thing. The pieces are rendered in 3D on a very high-resolution board, and the Community Chest and Chance cards are animated with QuickTime movies. The gameplay is also much faster than the real thing, thanks to the fact that you don’t have to fumble around with the dice, wait for the banker, or sort through the property cards. Mr. Monopoly himself hosts the game, and each of the pieces comes alive with his/her very own soundtrack. You can even play network games, either on a LAN or over the internet. The game works with the GameRanger service, which allows you to easily find other players to monopolize.
But when you dig a little deeper, the game loses a bit of its luster. For example, the host voice is incredibly annoying, as are the voices of most of the pieces. You can turn them off, but with the host voice deactivated, auctions take place in total silence, which makes it tough to know what’s going on. The interface is also less appealing than it could be. For example, the game lets you use custom rules, but it doesn’t allow you to save a set of your favorite rules for easy access. Instead, you must customize the game each time you play it.
Worse, the game has some very irritating bugs. For example, if a player owes you money, but they have to sell houses/hotels or mortgage properties to pay up, and you decide to save your game during the process, when you return to the game, you have your money, but they still have their stuff. The game also crashes more often than it should, often for no good reason.
The game is a lot of fun; don’t get me wrong. But MacSoft needs to release an update to the game, quick, to take care of some major interface and stability issues. They also need to stop canceling the good games...I really wanted to buy Worms: Armageddon!
| Discussions? --- Interact with the writers and other readers... |
| Re: macsoft scrabble | Sue H. |
| Re: Re: macsoft scrabble | Sue H. |
| Re: macsoft scrabble | robert baggs |
| Re: macsoft scrabble | connie |
| Re: macsoft scrabble | Ted |
| macsoft scrabble | Sharon |
| Re: worms armageddon | mike |
| worms armageddon | tommaso |
| Games like Monopoly and Scrabble are good for the Mac | Adryan |
| We need more mac game companies |