Hotel Giant - JoWood

                      Reviewed by Sue

JoWood bring out strategy games quicker than I can complete them.
First there was Traffic Giant. Then I bought Industry Giant
cheaply in Computer Exchange having played the demo of Industry
Giant 2. Now there's Hotel Giant where you, surprise, surprise,
have to manage a top hotel in - quote - one of 23 exotic
locations.

Full installation takes 606 meg but 900 meg of space is required
to play the game. Direct X 8.1 is provided on the CD. The game
needs at least a 350mhz PII running Windows 95 and 64 meg of RAM.

Visually the game looks more like The Sims than most other
strategy games because the figures are larger than usual; no
ant-size people scurrying round THIS game.

I'd originally run Hotel Giant on Windows 2000. After reformatting
my hard disk and going to Windows XP it took ages getting it to run,
despite trying all different compatibility modes, resolutions,
numbers of colours etc. In the end, what worked for me was Windows
2000 compatibility with 256 colours.

When the game first loads, you're given the option to play the
tutorial. Selecting yes loads the game.

Hotel Giant, it is explained, lets you design and build your dream
hotel. There are 19 buildings, over a dozen facilities, and more
than 600 objects to play with. The tutorial starts in a small inn.
You're told how to use the mouse to move round the hotel, check on
customers and see if they have any complaints. You can follow
customers and see where they go and what they do.  If that doesn't
sound seedy enough, you can take photos. Don't worry, it isn't as
bad as it sounds. Once you've taken 10 photos of your hotel, you
can progress to the next part of the tutorial.

At the end of each section, you're given a score. This includes
your customers' satisfaction levels, hotel class, monthly profit
and other factors.

The next part of the tutorial is titled Fixer Upper. You have to
upgrade a small inn by building new guest rooms and improving the
ones already there. In the third part you start from scratch and
have to set up the front desk and guest rooms too.

Guest rooms are created by dragging an outline, then filling it
with objects like beds and chairs. You can create sub rooms such
as bathrooms and bedrooms and there are several grades from normal
to suite, each with different criteria such as room size and
customer satisfaction.

The fourth is more tricky. You have a larger hotel with a
restaurant. You have to make the restaurant and hotel more
profitable. Unfortunately you don't have access to all options to
do with hiring and firing of staff. My punters were complaining
about dirty dishes, cold food and poor service. I would have liked
to have brought in better staff, paying them more money, but this
wasn't allowed. I had to make do with the idiots I'd been given.

In this level you'll learn a lot more about building rooms,
because it's harder to make a profit. I tried to go for some
consistency in the shape of the rooms, so they fitted together
better and I didn't waste space. By checking to see what people
expect from your hotel, you can see what types of rooms are most
needed. There's no point in having lots of single rooms and losing
out on the lucrative 4-bed market.

All the different rooms are created in the same way as guest
rooms. Drag out an area, add items. For restaurants this includes
tables, chairs, booths and desks to pay your bill. You can add
lighting, carpets, plants. Most items come in different grades.
The guests will moan if the setting is tacky so it isn't always a
good idea to buy cheaply.

And there's more to understand. The fifth learning tutorial lets
you set up a business centre with computers, meeting rooms and all
the paraphernalia those entail. You can also take out a bank loan
to finance this, and set up advertising. But being a tight-wad, I
didn't do either.

In the sixth game, you have to build a two star hotel anywhere in
the world. In this scenario you can also build a library and
swimming pool indoors. In the seventh scenario, you can also add a
health club, staff training and other hotel packages. You can also
hire and fire people (Yay! At last!)

In the final scenario you have to pull out all the stops. You only
have 2 years to get your new London hotel up to a 10% profit
margin. As an extra you can have a bar. This has already been
built, as has a restaurant, health club, business centre, swimming
pool and library. There are also a few hotel rooms but you've got
four floors to play with!

The ninth scenario pulls everything together. You've got 3 years
and 3 million dollars to build the best hotel in Sydney. The new
facility to build is a game room with pool tables, pinball
machines and video games.

This is the last tutorial. Once you've completed it, you're ready
to tackle the campaign. At first only the first five scenarios are
available to you; others open up as you complete earlier ones.
Each has its own challenge. I'm on my sixth scenario and the
hardest thing I had to do so far is have several customers with
100% satisfaction.

Before you start playing download the patch from the official 
site. It's also on one of the SynTax CDs. I found the game often 
didn't load without it.

You can not only save your game but also save all or some of your
room layouts. This is a great time saver in future games.

All in all I'm really enjoying this game. I've only seen one
review for it and the reviewer thought it was a very boring game.
I disagree. 


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