Slim Gaming - Transport Tycoon

Ahh, Transport Tycoon. No other game has been installed on so many of my computers. Starting from my dad’s old desktop, through my first notebook, a venerable IBM (Yes, IBM, not Lenovo!) Thinkpad 755CD, a number of Toshiba and Dell notebooks, all the way to my Eee Pad Slider, and my current MacBook Air. While planning the first few instalments of this series, I had originally planned to exclude Transport Tycoon on account of its age. It was, after all, first published in 1994, just months after my family had left Germany, and I originally wanted the series to focus on more current games. However, given the amount of time I’ve sunk, and continue to sink into this game, I decided it was only fair to include it.

Railways are the mainstay of the game. From small branch lines like this... 

...to large mainlines with multiple branches, the only limits, are your creativity, your bank account, and the goodwill of the local authorities.

The premise of the game is simple. You take control over a fledgling transport business in the first half of the 20th century, and have 100 years to build it into the biggest company of its kind, driving any competing companies out of business or taking them over. You do this by transporting goods, passengers and mail between factories and towns with a variety of vehicles, from trains, buses, and lorries to ferries and freighters all the way to modern jet aircraft. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Especially when you’ve got local authorities offering up subsidies for operating certain routes or transporting certain types of cargo. Well, think again. Local authorities won’t stand idly by while you carpet their entire countryside with railroad tracks, roads, or airports, and if you build too much without actually serving a village, town, or city, you won’t be allowed to build anything there. Yes, Transport Tycoon does simulate planning permission, although appeals boards aren’t included thank god. Add to that the fact that you’l start with nothing more than a loan, and you as a fledgling transport entrepreneur have your work cut out for you.

Planes, trains, boats, and automobiles. All the vehicles you can play in OpenTTD in one picture. That harbour has been highly modified with content from the online repository.

Oil Rigs will start popping up from the 1950s onwards. Helicopters are a key component in transporting passengers and mail to and from those rigs.

We'll make him an offer he can't refuse. From time to time, you will be given the option of having "early access" to new vehicles at a reduced price. The downside is that these vehicles will have a higher likelihood of breakdowns.

Okay, I’ll have to be straight with you here. This isn’t the Original Transport Tycoon, or Transport Tycoon Deluxe we’re talking about here, but OpenTTD, a “clone” if you will of the original Transport Tycoon. The internal framework is still there, the look and feel is still the same, and the game mechanics are pretty much identical, however OpenTTD is far more powerful than the original game ever was. it is available for all major operating systems, as well as Android, and I’ve played it for hours on my Eee Pad Slider. Given that the original is such an ancient game by modern standards, it can run on pretty much any hardware, and even large environments are possible without much hassle. However, the under-the-hood-changes in OpenTTD give the game a much more realistic feel, with a new terrain generator leading to more realistic landscapes, and a more advanced, path-based, signalling system for trains. What’s more, OpenTTD has access to a massive online content repository that enables your to modify the game mechanics, vehicles and even environments in ways you couldn’t even dream of in the original game. 

Don't like the content of the game? Just download new one. The online repository included in OpenTTD is pretty impressive, and will enable you to change almost every aspect of the game. 

A mod manager to activate or deactivate the downloaded mods is included as well.

I mentioned before that this game is pretty old, it was originally designed to run on the good old 486 processors, even the most anaemic netbook on the market today has more than enough power to run this game, I certainly did not experience anything even remotely resembling performance issues on my MacBook Air, nor did I notice any unusual levels of battery drain, not that I pay much attention to that when I play OpenTTD. And that’s what’s so remarkable about this game. Even more than twenty years after it was initially published, it till has that “…just … one … more … thing …” factor, that is so well known from games like XCOM, or the Civilization series by Sid Meier. It still feels good playing it, and the graphics, while old, certainly have a certain model railway charm. That, combined with the continued support by the user community, the availability of new graphics, vehicles and game mechanics through the online repository, and its simple but challenging game mechanics mean that OpenTTD, and by extension Transport Tycoon, remain valid today, and definitely deserve a place on your MacBook.