Thoughts by Mr Creosote (01 Jul 2023) – PC (DOS)
Mad TV transformed the typically German business simulation genre. Where before, dry columns of numbers kept being sold surprisingly well, everything suddenly “had to” be illustrated in the most absurd possible comic style after. All local developers followed few years after. Their talent in game design did not magically increase. Dime City uses an office building as its main hub, selecting doors to trigger functions. Beyond that, there are no actual similarities.
The game’s objective is to get your mafia type enterprise to the underworld’s top. This includes the usual genre fare, such as extortion, robbery and prostitution. All those activities require manpower and equipment which has to be acquired. Which is performed in very roundabout accountancy ways. Where do you find stores which could be valuable targets? At which street corners to let your hookers look for clients? You scroll and click around on confusing city maps until you randomly find a worthwhile spot. The amount of people broken down by job and tools needed are then simply presented on a shopping list which the player just has to fulfil.
This being essentially the game’s core activity, it deserves closer examination. Pretty much everything about it is wrong. The confused searching of targets is nothing but frustrating busywork, stealing your time. And then, when the interesting decisionmaking should start, meaning when it is time to plan your undertaking, the ideal solution is simply presented to you on a silver platter. Which you are then supposed to implement. It is apparently not anticipated that you could experiment, learn and optimize based on your own experience.
Apart from that, there are numerous other ways to earn money, ranging from forward contracts of weapons to stock market trading. It’s just that all of that is no different from the business simulations of the 1980s and it is not at all made more entertaining just because the “commodities” you buy and sell are “slaves” etc. The aspect of the legal cover company, introduced as a big deal at first, falls flat as well, as bribery can essentially solve everything should anything go wrong. None of those options add anything to the game, really, because they just exist alongside each other. They do not interweave, build upon each other or anything.
There is no accounting for taste. In the mid 1990s, there was a short trend in German business simulations to also include hyper-sexualized female cartoon characters of deformed body proportions. It is important to remember that at the time, computer games were pretty much exclusively aimed at male teenagers who had major issues interacting with the opposite sex in the real world. Dime City falls exactly into this zeitgeist.
The already bad taste in this respect is easily topped by the formal game objective. A nebulous godfather needs to be bombed out of this world by remote activation. Where to find the activation code? On his secretary’s naked body. Who will willingly undress to anyone showering her with gifts and flirting relentlessly. Engaging in any interaction with her is triggered by grabbing her behind. Ouch! Starbyte even offered to send a patch disk for a low price, enabling further nude pictures in game.
The rest of this mess fits in perfectly with the impressions so far. Sabotaging the competition? Played out in an action scene in the style of Cannon Fodder, in which you first need to find your own controllable character (!) and need to continue scrolling the screen manually (!) throughout. Three pieces of elevator music are constantly repeating themselves. And anyway, what is the point of “funny” background pictures if they primarily obscure what is important? After about an hour of playing, you will wish for clear, efficient icons (or even, if nothing else is possible, text menus).
There are good reasons why Dime City is broadly unknown these days. The marketing expectation must have been that a funny outward appearance would make it appealing. Regardless of changing tastes over time, which should anyway be enough to avoid, there is simply no entertaining gameplay core to be found. And it is another lesson that an inflation of game options does not automatically equal depth.