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| Zoo Tycoon: For those of you that loved riding elephants as much as I did... |
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So you?ve built theme parks for roller coasters. You?ve established thriving civilizations, and fought for peace here and there. When it comes to building, expanding, and ultimately thriving, you?ve done it all. But I?ll bet you never planned, built, and ran a zoo. That?s right, Microsoft is gearing up to bring you a fresh new sim game that?s absolutely ?zoo?-per! So get out your rucksacks and faux leather croc hats, and try your hand at zoo-keeping.
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Zoo Tycoon promises to let you have a hands-on approach to everything you could want from a zoo. That means adopting more than 40 different kinds of animals, judging the different types of terrain, setting up the entire exhibit, research money allocation, and much more. You can bring in gift and food shops to your zoo, and all the shops have customizable item prices. This way, you can set the appropriate prices for your customers. You can hire a staff, and you also control how much they make a month as well. The amount of control you have is absolutely amazing. Blue Fang Games did an extraordinary job with all the thought that went into this game.
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The basic layout is to get a grassland type of terrain and build it into a monumental zoo. Every sound that a zoo should have is here with quite pleasurable music to accommodate. Zoo Tycoon?s jazzy visuals make each of the 175-plus building materials as distinguishable as the next one. The animals look really great, and even the cheetahs and jaguars look different from each other. You?ll take a pair of these animals, and place them in a well thought-out exhibit in hopes to keep them happy so they?ll breed. If the animals are happy, then the photo snapping customers are happy, and voila... beautiful zoo! You can place money to research different items for your zoo ranging from petting houses to new animals. Be warned though, as unhappy animals mean escaped animals that eat stuff they?re not supposed to eat. You?ll also have to hire extra zookeepers so they can come out and tranquilize the feral escapees. I can?t possibly say enough about how Zoo Tycoon is a beautifully thought-out ?total strategy? type of game.
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Riot Rundown: Zoo Tycoon looks to be a great game. With fireworks for graphics and lovely sounds, all the physical beauty is definitely there. The gameplay is phenomenal, with every animal reacting to its environment like it should. For instance, putting the gazelles with the duck pond was nice, but putting the alligators with the duck pond left it as just a ?pond? real quick. From mealtime assignments to exhibit cleaning, Zoo Tycoon looks to be a well-armed game for strategy lovers everywhere. Look for it sometime in October 2001.
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-Sydney Riot, GameVortex Communications AKA Will Grigoratos |
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