GOTD – Aerobiz
Aerobiz / Aerobiz: Supersonic – Simulation/Strategy (SNES/GEN)
Koei
The SNES era was one of great experimentation for Koei. One of these experiments took the form of an airline business simulator – similar, I’d imagine, to what an Airline Tycoon game would be like (apparently one’s out, but I haven’t played it, nor do I plan to). You select a city and start out with an amount of money based on the starting city, and you buy airplanes and open routes between major world cities.
In the original game, there were only two scenarios – one starting in the 1960s, one in the 1980s. Although there are other differences (city economies, etc), the major difference between the two is in the planes available.
Some small touches make the game interesting; for example, if your airline’s headquarters is situated in Moscow, you can only buy planes from the company in the Soviet Bloc. If a war starts in a country, routes to cities in that country become unprofitable.
Unfortunately, the game can get somewhat repetetive. It can be rather difficult to find out how a route can be made more profitable, and since there are some cities it is better to start in for the money bonus (New York, London, Tokyo) games can start to look pretty similar. If you try it on the higher difficulty settings, though, you may find a strategic challenge.
Like most Koei games, this game has (slow) multiplayer, up to four. This can make the game more fun, but the pacing keeps it from being an especially amazing game.
The sequel, Aerobiz: Supersonic, has more scenarios (some set in the future), several dozen more cities (the original had 20-some), some more complex situations, et cetera. I don’t know if any more sequels have been done in Japan, but I doubt they took the game much farther over there.
If this game had used Koei’s more traditional officer-based system for some of the tasks (say, flight managers, negotiations, advisers), this could’ve been a better game. As it is, though, it’s not a bad one. Give it a try if you like simulation-style games. Or airplanes, I suppose.
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