By Dale Farris, Secretary
Golden Triangle PC Club
April 2002

Game Overview

Have you ever dreamed of running your own casino? Here's your chance!

Casino Mogul is a super new Sim game that allows you to design and manage a gambling casino, just like the casino moguls that rule the roost in the gambling Mecca's around the world and in the U.S.

For Dreamcatcher Games, Casino Mogul represents a game genre that is relatively new to this well established, experienced adventure game company. With the extraordinary success of the more well known sim game, The Sims, and all the add-ons to The Sims, it is understandable that other computer game developers have flocked to this genre to develop new approaches to the successful simulation game genre that was mostly established by The Sims game.

This neat game was originally released as Casino Tycoon in Europe, and has been released as Casino Mogul in the U.S.

In this new venture between Dreamcatcher Games and Monte Cristo Games, Casino Mogul builds in all the expected features sim game aficionados desire. You start with a blank slate, basically an empty floor space that represents the casino business floor, and then you begin to invest in games and decor, hire and fire staff, attract celebrities to generate interest in your business, and manage your customers.

In Casino Mogul, you build and manage a casino in an Asian, Monte Carlo, or Las Vegas style. The game includes two different modes of play. These include competition, where players compete against other casinos in the area, and scenario, where players must achieve a specific set of goals without worrying about competing casinos.

In building their casino, players have access to more than 15 casino games such as slot machines, blackjack, poker, craps, roulette, baccarat, and bingo, as well as 15 different support structures, including restaurants, keno lounges, cashier booths, gift shops, hotels, and sports bars. Players must try to keep their clients happy while watching for cheaters with security cameras and well-trained dealers. Through careful management and strategy, players can build their little casino into one of the hottest resorts in the area.

Features

Build the casino of your dreams
Emulate the Oriental, the Monte Carlo, or the Las Vegas casinos
Place all casino games
Games include roulette, black jack, craps, keno, poker and more
Develop the infrastructure
Place restaurants, bars, gift shops, hotels, keno lounges, cash machines
Look after your clientele
Watch for indicators and take care of their every need
Meet their satisfaction, hunger, cash, or medical needs
Explore super 3D views
Walk around in first person, security camera, or god-like view
Oversee your entire operation
Attract bonus customers, like billionaires, to make your casino a hot spot
Hire all sorts of casino staff
Pit bosses, dealers, wait staff, security guards, entertainers can be added
Very realistic simulation of actual casino business operations
Colorful graphics and backgrounds
Customers express needs through bubble ideas
People of all sorts walk around the casino
Watch customers play games, cash checks, eat in restaurants
Super implementation of business strategy to run this unique business
Unique idea of applying sim game technology to this business
Setting is well designed and can be changed in many ways
Super learning experience for real world casino management

Game Play

In Casino Mogul, you will need to prove that you have what it takes to create and run the ultimate casino. The underlying theme is to maximize your profits by growing your casino from a small card room to that of a super Las Vegas style establishment. You achieve this through careful management and proper placement of hundreds of unique gambling games and decor.

You will need to expand in size by buying increased floor space and carefully monitoring the payouts, costs, and placement of each game machine. Your responsibilities also include management of casino staff salaries and attributes all the while keeping a look out for seedy thieves trying to steal away your profits. All will come into play when you try to achieve your title status as the next ultimate Casino Mogul.

When you first start this super sim, you can begin with a good tutorial that helps learn the do's and don'ts of general game play. In the Sandbox, you will be able to play freeform, without the worry of any pressures. This mode gives you the time to get everything just the way you want it. Once you have your casino built to your specifications, you can take a screenshot and compare it with others.

The challenges mode is broken down into 2 main challenge types. The first is the competition challenges. In competition mode, you will be competing man vs. machine. The idea is to finish better than your competition. You will have 4 artificial intelligence (AI) players of varying difficulty, and the goal is to beat them in a knock down, drag out, battle to the finish.

You will be given 3 base scenarios from which to compete. As you progress each week, you will be provided with a gaming commission report to see where you stand in the ranks.

The second  category is the 5 Star Challenges. These challenges will put you in varying situations of disarray, with an expectation of you being able to turn things around and make a 5 star casino. You will have 6 of these types of challenges. These range from you taking over a broken down casino or casinos that were being poorly run before you assumed management, to casinos that will need a complete overhaul. The ultimate goal is to turn these former disasters into money making machines before you tap your cash to zero and go bankrupt.

You can choose from 3 skill levels, easy, medium, and hard, Depending on which you select, your starting cash will be effected. If you think you are doing too well, or too easy, try increasing the difficulty level.

Later in the game, you can develop your casino to take on a theme. You can choose from the intrigues of the Far East, or go with the luxurious European Monte Carlo style. The themes provide their distinct wall and floor sets, as well as unique structures and staff.

You start with a blank slate, and go from there. The build button is used to build all items or to change the current look and feel of the environment. Some items here will not show up until later in the game.

The status of the casino can be selected also. This gives you information on various statistical analyses of the casino, offering graphical details on the casino operation. You can also navigate in and around the casino, and zoom in and out.

The information bar at the bottom of the screen displays your casino rating, and your cash on hand. The bar also gives you your customer occupancy, a running count of how many guests are in your casino at any time. The day counter counts up and acts as a timer. Messages are displayed across the top of the information bar, such as your customers are hungry, or there is no place to cash checks, or where are the bathrooms? These provide you with information about why guest are leaving, their wants and needs, and especially alert messages that must be attended to very quickly.

Right clicking on objects or guests will bring up windows that tell you about them. As in The Sims, there are also different emoticlouds that pop up whenever a guest staff or object has a problem. These include a guest that is thirsty, a thief, a suspicious dealer, a guest that needs a bathroom, guest that needs rest, or needs cash, or needs to eat, a guest that that has had too much to drink, is upset or ready to leave, or the building is broken (shows only on objects).

Further information about getting started playing the game is also provided in the detailed game player guide that accompanies the game. I found this jump start section very helpful in getting acquainted with all the many things you have to manage and keep up with in Casino Mogul.

Practical Applications

Although Casino Mogul is of course a sim game, marketed to gamers, I also think this particular sim has merit in educational settings. I have always wondered when we would see the solid sim game coding and programming, that up to now has always been focused on marketing entertaining computer games for people to play in their leisure time, applied to real-world situations.

In the case of Casino Mogul, I think we have an excellent example of how this sim approach to computer gaming can be highly useful in business colleges across the country. The many aspects of running a casino business are well designed and integrated into the game, and are quite relevant to the real world of actually running such a business. Although Casino Mogul of course has been designed to be played for fun, I think the fun aspect of the game makes it even more of a potential resource for college business students wishing to have fun while learning the truth about what it really takes to run a business like a gambling casino.

Recommendation

I strongly recommend Casino Mogul not only to gamers, but to colleges of business wishing to set aside time for business students interested in learning what is involved in managing a casino.

Game Saves

You can save your game at any point, a feature always appreciated by sim gamers. This allows you to temporarily stop a simulation in progress, and to pick it back up again later.

Install and Setup

The game should install and set up with no problems. The game comes on one CD ROM disc.

Uninstalling the game involves the use of the games uninstall feature in its folder on the Start, Programs menu.

I loaded the game on a Win 98 SE machine (P III-850, 256MB SDRAM) that had a Creative Labs Annihilator 2, 32MB video card (an nVidia GeForce 2 GTS board), and a Creative Labs Live X Gamer! sound board, and the latest drivers for each. An HP CD RW 9200 drive served as the CD ROM drive, and I had a 12X DVD ROM drive for the DVD ROM version. The mouse and keyboard were both USB connections. I also had already installed the DirectX 8.1 files, and did not need to install the DirectX files that came with the game. My machine also had an internal Zip 250 drive, standard floppy, MPEG 2 decoder card, two 8-port USB hubs, a Logitech Wingman Extreme joystick, standard microphone, Cambridge Soundworks DTS 2000 speaker system, and a NIC board connected to SW Bell's DSL modem.

Price

$19.99

NOTE: With this sim, as with most other sims now on the market, playing through the simulation process can easily extend into many, many hours of gameplay, depending on the particular strategy you take, and how attentive you are to the many aspects of the simulation you interact with and control. This means for the price of Casino Mogul, sim gamers are getting a lot of game play value for this minimal investment.

Also note that an official walkthrough strategy guide is less necessary with Casino Mogul, since it is a sim game. The game guide that comes with Casino Mogul has been well developed to help explain all the complex features in the game.

Minimum System Configuration Requirements

P-II 350 Mhz or higher processor
Windows 95, 98, 98 SE, 98 ME, 2000, XP
64MB RAM
350MB free hard disk space
4x CD-ROM Drive
8MB DirectX 8.0 compatible video card
DirectX 8.0 compatible sound card

The use of a 3dfx video card will ensure that you enjoy the unusual experience of changing perspectives while playing the game. In first-person, for example, your view changes to present what the casino looks like from the floor as if you were actually walking around your newly emerging business. Customers and employees all move around you, as you watch, and this is a neat added benefit to this super new sim.

At the time of this writing, no patches for this game had yet been released.

At the time of this writing, DreamCatcher also sells games for Mac machines, with more soon to be available also for the Mac. No other information was available on the future continued support of their software for Apple machines. I am guessing this support is very likely to continue.

The above system configuration requirements indicate the minimum system configuration requirements, and as any experienced gamer knows, you just don't ever want to load and run any computer game on minimally configured systems. Computer games are notorious for taking over machines, and this is why users will need to be sure and close out all their other open files, before playing this and any computer game.

About DreamCatcher

In 1996, DreamCatcher Interactive launched their first title and since then, they have become a very successful publisher in the computer game entertainment software industry. In my opinion, one of this company's strongest assets is their dedication to provide customers with high quality entertainment software at very affordable prices. Some of the best interactive computer games now on the market come from DreamCatcher.

Bringing to market titles that are affordable, without jeopardizing content quality, is another significant factor that helps distinguish this company from the many that flood the market with countless game titles. DreamCatcher thrives on innovative marketing strategies, solid retail and developer partnerships, and on providing excellent customer support that is well above industry standards.

A new partnership with Her Interactive has enabled DreamCatcher to now sell the super games in the Nancy Drew series, including Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill, Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned for Danger, and Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion. Check this link to read a review of these Nancy Drew Interactive Mystery Adventure Games.

Dracula: The Resurrection and In Cold Blood are two current games for the PC that will soon be released for the Playstation, and DreamCatcher also plans to release more games in the future for the Playstation 2 and the GameBoy Color platforms.

Necronomicon ($19.99) and The Legend of the Prophet and the Assassin ($19.99) are two of DreamCatcher's newer games that should also prove to be successful titles in their long list of super adventure games.

Other super games from DreamCatcher Interactive include Traitor's Gate, The Messenger, Riddle of the Sphinx, Jewels of the Oracle, Jewels II, Egypt 1156 B.C., Odyssey, TimeScape, Ancient Conquest, Beyond Time, Beyond Atlantis, Lightbringer, Legend of Lotus Spring, Nightlong, Seven Games of the Soul (also sold in Europe as Faust), SafeCracker, The Forgotten, The Sacred Amulet, and Time Machine.

All these are similarly designed adventure games, and all are priced very reasonably, the most expensive being $29.99 (In Cold Blood), with most around $14.99, and many even priced at $9.99, which I think are super prices for these super games. At the time of this writing, I have purchased and played nearly all these games, and these reasonable price points have always gotten my attention.

I think these affordable price points represent a very important strategy of DreamCatcher that has helped them achieve their success. When you consider the very expensive proposition to invest in the coding and other very expensive costs to develop and produce a computer game today, I think it is quite remarkable that this company markets their products at such a reasonable price.

I also think it is important to remember that DreamCatcher is still very much in the business of producing quality computer games, something many other companies can no longer attest to since they have gone out of business. What is even more remarkable, in my opinion, is that at the time of this writing, DreamCatcher Interactive remains wholly owned and self-sufficient, and has not yet been absorbed by a larger company.

So, with the easy on the pocket-book price of the game, and the also minimal price of the solution guides, you have the makings of a winner in the hotly contested battle for our limited disposable income and free time to invest in playing computer games. DreamCatcher Interactive is certainly a company worth watching and supporting.

About Monte Cristo Games

Monte Cristo was founded in 1995 and has been growing ever since. The company now employs 57 people (19 at end 1999), and by the end of 2002, the recruitment possibilities will amount to 120 new jobs. Founded in 1995, Monte Cristo began when Jean Marc de Féty met Jean Christophe Marquis. Long before finishing their studies, they were both convinced of the promising future of video games.

After a market analysis mainly dedicated to simulation, adventure, role play, sport and action games, and because of their economic backgrounds, they decided to create and develop strategy and management games in a realistic world, in which finance and virtual markets, stock exchange transactions, and start-up creations introduce everyone to economics, financial mechanisms, and million-dollar businesses. The company even has developed a fun sim approach to running a manufacturing venture, Crazy Factory.

Contact Information

DreamCatcher
The Adventure Company
5000 Dufferin Street
Toronto, Ontario
M3H 5T5
info@dreamcatchergames.com

You can also order from other retailers or online vendors.