Steigenberger Hotelmanager
for Amiga (OCS/ECS)

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Mr Creosote:
Company: First Step / Bomico
Year: 1991
Genre: Strategy
Theme: Business / Multiplayer
Language: Deutsch
Licence: Commercial
Views: 10265
Review by Mr Creosote (2011-09-11)
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Your great aunt Hillie died and she left you 400000 DM. Just right to fulfil your lifelong dream to get into the hotel business! Or rather almost, but the bank will help you out for the rest. So now, at least, you buy your first house.

Which consists of a humble boarding house with only few rooms. It is your job to make this place as attractive as possible. So you need some staff – from concierge to maid. Finally, you can also offer additional services, like a sauna or a gym. Or maybe buy a car to rent out? Or even a doctor right on your premises? Depending on your selections, you set an appropriate price per room and hope for your first guests. Month by month, your financial balance is presented to you in typically German manner: as dry as possible. Each round, you juggle the numbers a little until you've found the right balance which between spending and income which results in a humble profit margin.

And that is basially it. Clicking on the button to end the turn makes up most of the rest of the game while you slowly become rich. Sure, you can improve your hotel's quality gradually by equipping the rooms better, offer more services and increase the room price adaequately, but unless you make (unnecessary) risky experiments, there is basically no losing anymore. The only few surprises arrive in the form of random events on the banal level of Monopoly.

If you play alone, this turns into a bore rather quickly. After some time, you will have earned enough money to upgrade to the next hotel level. You can't own more than one hotel at a time, though, so it's just the same thing all over again, just with a larger number of rooms – until you finally reach „Steigenberger“ level (it would be interesting to know who paid whom money: Bomico to Steigenberger for the use fo the name or the other way around for the advertisement). If you are this patient. Sometimes, you receive the message that a rival hotel has opened in the vicinity; but there is no interaction! What are their prices and services? Since you don't know, you can't react at all in order to compete for guests.

At least with more human players, there are some hints at active rivalry. You can try to set fire to the other hotels or send a group of thugs there. Until everybody realises that the perfect solution for everybody is to just leave each other alone.

The manual talks about a development time of two years. Looking at the final product, it is very unclear where this time is supposed to have gone. Unless someone was using the project to learn his very first programming language, something like this could be implemented by a single developer within a week! Too little for a professional game.

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