Independent strategy title bucks puzzle game trend At a time where the marketplace for independent games is saturated by Tetris clones and other casual puzzle games, UK developer Positech computing have just released their management/Sim game Starship Tycoon Starship Tycoon draws its inspiration from games such as Eve Online, SimCity and Rollercoaster Tycoon, to put you in the position of a futuristic businessman running his own stellar shipping company. Unlike squeaky clean titles like SimCity, Starship Tycoon lets you play dirty, running your ship on cheap fuel, with broken components and underpaid unhappy staff, and even turn to smuggling, bribing customs officials and turning a blind eye to safety. Of course, if you want to play it clean, you can run a happy ship, but where's the fun in that? A number of timed scripted missions allow you to beat objectives against the clock, or you can play in a freeform 'sandbox' mode against the rival AI companies, In addition, a random map generator and 5 difficulty levels make for endless gameplay. Starship Tycoon has bags of gameplay, but it won't strain your system, running happily on any 16MB video card, on a Pentium 400 or better. The games graphics are fully adjustable for windowed or full screen and a wide range of resolutions and detail levels. The game demo is easily downloadable, even on dialup at only 6MB, and thegame is priced $24.99 The demo is downloadable from www.starshiptycoon.com

Starship Tycoon (6.28MB)