Fast Food Tycoon

Discount Price: $24.95

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

No, I Don't Want Ants On My Pizza [Posted on 2003-02-24]
Pros: Cute graphics...$5 "Bargain Bin" at CompUsa

Cons: Confusing layout! No instruction manual,
Infuriating...difficult to understand, time-consuming, Interface impossible to deal with, limited control, yadda, yadda, yadda

The Bottom Line: Avoid it! The jewel case will make a great coaster for the soda I'm sipping while playing a REAL game. If your goal is to drive someone insane, literally, then this is the perfect gift. Otherwise, don't waste your money.

Summary:
The Pros:

The idea of it all. They potentially had something so good in this game.

The scenarios. Easy, medium or hard as well as "most income" or "Most popular" or "First one to make a million dollars". I liked the option of not really having any goal and just playing so that I wouldn't blink and be obliterated.

You can check on how different "target groups" are responding to your restaurant, your food, etc. Click on the target group and a little Polaroid Photo sort of thing pops up and they're either smiling or making a pre-vomiting face.

The "make your own pizza" part! Oh man this was fun! You sort through all your ingredients and apply liberally. You have the traditional meats and cheeses and veggies. You also have all sorts of seafood and insect life. Ew, right? Well, you open franchises in different countries and hey, tastes vary. What else is fun when you're making your pizza is they have a "Chopper". You can click your ingredient over the chopper and it'll dice it smaller and smaller and it's graphically correct and adorable. Cheese starts as a block (chopper chopper) and then it's a thinner slice (chopper chopper) and then it's small chunks, and then shreds, and then sprinkles. How cute! Tomatoes go from whole to halves to quarters to slices to paste! Fun!

The Cons:

I'm ashamed to say that I couldn't figure out how to play this game for the life of me. Being impatient, I just jumped on in and thought I was going to kick some butt. After about 20 minutes I was still staring at the screen, clicking on various things.

Aaaaalright, I'll take the tutorial. It turned the light bulb on in my head in terms of staffing, decoration and purchasing supplies. Frustrating though...I clicked on everything on the screen before I'd click on what it wanted me to. The graphics are loud and confusing. What does a big face mean? Staff? Syndicate? Exit?

Oddly enough when I started my next game I couldn't find ANY of the buttons that were there in the tutorial...I couldn't find the staffing, my "information history" and couldn't even figure out how to open my darn restaurant.

Infuriating! I checked out my restaurant...it had some people and staff in it...but when I clicked around it sent me to some other restaurant. I sure the heck didn't open that one or decorate it, where'd it come from? Argh!

You have the option of having things done "automatically" for you in various areas (Select them when you begin your scenario if you'd like) but doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of building your own Pizza Empire?

ENJOYED IT :) [Posted on 2004-06-19]
I purchased this game about 2 years ago, and I still pop it into my computer every now and then (yep .. it managed to catch my attention for that long!)
The lack of an instruction manual in this game is really no big deal -- I picked up the basics very quickly using plain old common sense. Some buttons and feautures still remain unknown to me, but this has not affected my gameplay at all.
I love the fact that within this game you can actually make your own pizzas by picking out what size you want the pizzas to be; you also have a large amount of toppings to choose for every pie that you make.
You also have the ability to decorate your actual pizza parlor. Although there are not many decor choices, you can build a fairly decent place. In the end, this game does not contain any fancy graphics, but it is based on an innovative concept that will make you play it over and over again :)

Funny game, but awfully frustrating to grasp [Posted on 2005-08-01]
The entire game becomes quite difficult to understand, and even the tutorials didn't help much. After a while, it took several weeks for me to understand how to make a profit, and I managed to ever so slowly. But it's a funny game, from the bouncy music to the way they classify all your customers (kids, goths, plebs, VIPs, yuppies, students, tourists, and teens). And, unlike most other Tycoon games, there's a surprising amount of sabotage involved.

You start with joining a bank and advertising agency. The real work divides into three areas, with an optional fourth if you wanna get dirty-

1. The branch itself. You buy a building (comes in small/medium/large) and decorate it with chairs and tables and a few knick-knacks that don't matter save the jukebox. When you open the pizza branch this is where you see all the customers come in and order. It's a pizza place, but it runs like a restaurant with the waiters and such. You may also need a warehouse to keep ingredients in.

2. The staff. There's cooks, waiters, temps, and sometimes a manager. They all have skill levels in which you can pay to train, but also they have other factors such as motivation and talent which affect their total efficiency. Despite how big your building(s) may be, you can only hire seven workers per branch. Full time workers work three shifts in a six-shift day, so you'll need at least two cooks and waiters to cover everything. Also, you have to keep them happy with pay increases (which you can never decrease, unfortunately).

3. The pizza. It was tough trying to satisfy all the different classes of people, but there are a lot of toppings to put on. Even ants and maggots. But by chopping up ingredients and finding the right balance amongst the meat, cheese, fruits, and vegs you could make the pizza very popular. You'll put your original pizzas, along with four standard toppings, on a menu which your customers will choose from.

4. Crime- if you decide to play with computer opponents (a no-no for beginners) then you'll want to wreck their branches through advertising, hiring punks to scare their customers, or joining a mob syndication. When you pull off jobs, you do third-person pointing and clicking to move and fire. It's something that earns some cash and is thrilling for about an hour, though.

The game offers a fair amount of data on pizza topping trends, a pie chart determining the cash flow, but many little icons and sections you'll have to look at over and over to discover what it actually means (you usually do so by holding the mouse over the icon and waiting for a small message to scroll above the icon.

B+ [Posted on 2005-11-08]
A fun challenging game that will most likely fulfil your sim-business needs. When you first start out, you will be without a manual, however there are preset in game scenarios that help you to get adjusted to the basic workings of the game and to help you move around and get accostomed to the gameplay. For a tycoon game, it was quite exceptional, and surprisingly entertaining, even if you ae not a fan of sim and tycoon games, you may still want to check this one out.

Humor doesn't cut it! [Posted on 2006-04-11]
Why is it called Fast Food Tycoon when all I can make is pizza? Hmmm... Anyway on with the review!

Positives
+ humorous, cartoony graphics make the game visually stimulating
+ colorful and interactive menus help streamline choices

Negatives
- abyssmal soundtrack and sound effects
- help menus and context slow and annoying
- game concepts are fuzzy and nigh impossible to master
- even on easy modes the computer knows all the tricks
- terrible and uninformative tutorials

Overall
... Fast Food Tycoon is a good idea with neat visuals but the implementation of the game is amateurish. It might be worth a few bucks but there are better tycoon games out there.
... Performance is fine - as long as your PC matches the recommended configuration you'll be good to go. Disable any virus software or other background services if you have problems.

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