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"You are in charge, sir!"

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 19 / 20
Date: April 20, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Some critics say Traffic Giant is a sheer boredom. But if you spend your patience with it, your are immensely rewarded. Backed by a solid economic model, the game emphasis on planning and long-term strategy. You are CEO of a public transport company. Your only goal: makes it profitable.

You start from scratch to build a transportation company by drawing your bus routes inside the cities, purchasing buses, coaches, double-decks from a wide range of selection, setting up bus stops along the busiest streets, and adjusting your bus fares, planning your advertising campaigns, setting your employees' wages and off you go, hoping the "sims" in the city would choose your company's services...rather than their own cars.

Pre-planning is required. The economic model is surprisingly believable, taking into account of all the important factors at a right proportion. Are your fares set reasonably? Are the bus stations located convenient enough? Do the buses provide reliable services? Are the buses going to the place that the "sims" really want? The prices are too expensive? What are the competitors doing? You've got to answer all these questions. You can always get the feedback from the citizens in the streets or their own cars. And the no. of passengers waiting at the bus stations would tell you if you are going along the right track.

Apart from making your own company profitable, your commitments to reduce the level of traffic congestion, providing a satisfying level of services measured in terms of popularity of each of your bus routes, company's image, and even the attractiveness of your buses and stations, are all but important. Setting too high a level of bus fares and wrecking one of your buses in the middle of the road would certainly prove detrimental. And don't forget, your other competitors won't give you a second chance.

If your company is profitable enough, you can always grow even "bigger" by laying tracks. Yes, trams and trains are available and they are expensive to purchase and maintain. Do it only if your company's cash position is strong enough. Remember, you can't do anything if you have negative cash balance...except selling off your own assets. But the trams and trains carry more people than a mere 100-passengers double- deck... and they seldom break.

In the campaign game, you are monopolizing the public transport (i.e. no competitor) but are given the priorities by the local municipal. If you are doing well, the authority would release one to three more cities for you to run your business, with a different set of goals. But your company is not carrying over to the next city. You always start from scratch. The campaign scenarios are overall well structured and you are given increasing difficult objectives. At one point, you are responsible to save a company from the verge of going bankrupt. However, you are never stuck by a single campaign scenario because you can always "skip" the difficult one and proceed to the next available, if you so wish. This thoughtful "flexibility" in the campaign design is greatly applauded.

While the campaign game is mildly challenged, you can always pit your wits against one to three computer competitors in a cutthroat price war or in a race to be the first one to find the best routes at the best price. The AI is generally competent. They extend their route to your area of operations relentlessly if they find it profitable. This game truly gives you the survivalist view in a commercial jungle.

The game's graphics are exquisite: churches, swimming pools, shopping arcades, cinemas, parks, governmental buildings, factories, commerce center...all are there. You can zoom in and out of the city at three levels. You always feel the vivid life in a city with the bustling voices of people, engines, tram bells etc.

Having all that, Traffic Giant is not without drawbacks though. You cannot design express route (i.e. fewer stops) overlapping the existing routes because you must have the same stops of an existing route along the same streets. Multiplayer is apparently not working for the moment. Interface design is rigid and takes you a while to get used to, with very few short-cut keys. In a non-competitive environment, you find not many things to do if your company is well established for constant cash-inflow, other than watching the highs and lows of the economic cycle in the game. Several game bugs also boot you back to the desktop all of a sudden. So "saves" your company (a.k.a. game) often. But these are just some quibbles for an otherwise splendid game.

Overall, Traffic Giant is the game that glues you to the monitor. In a risk-free environment, you run you company at million dollars and get a taste of what it's like a CEO, solve the all too headache traffic congestion problem, Traffic Giant offers you value for every dollar of your money.

Great strategy game!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 13 / 13
Date: January 03, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I think that when people say "The game is not working, don't buy it," they should rather say "The game is not working ON MY SYSTEM, *I* wish I hadn't bought it..."

Traffic Giant(US Gold Edition), with the latest patch 1.4, is working fine on my system (Win98, 128 MB RAM.) I have not experienced a single crash in many hours of gameplay, either when playing Campaigns or Endless games.

The game has very nice graphics and ok sound but, most of all, it is a lot of fun! Each map presents a very different challenge and the layouts of the many available cities are very interesting. It is a pleasure to just look at the cities, with its pedestrians, traffic and cute animations.

The only reasons I gave this game 4 stars instead of 5 are:

1. I wish the game had a map editor, to create our own city layouts.

2. The interface of the game could have been better. For instance:

I particularly dislike the fact that only up and down arrows are available to scroll through our lists of vehicles and lines, when it should also have had a scrollbar! It's ok at the beginning of the game, but when you have many vehicles and lines, it's a pain to find what you want using the up and down arrows...

Also badly designed is the "Create new line" option: the command is only available at the top of the list of lines, and then you have to click the "Build" button. This means that you must first scroll the list of lines to the top (with that stupid up arrow -- no scrollbar available!) and then click the "Build" button. Why didn't the designers include a "New Line" button instead is a mystery... At least they could have added a keyboard shortcut for it.

I also dislike the fact that we can't click on a line in the list to automatically jump to it on the map.

Aside from that, I'm enjoying the game immensely! :)

The detailed & urban version of "A-train"

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: August 22, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you like Mass transit and traffic and all that, then you'll love this game. I've read many reviews where they said the computer kept crashing, or it would crash when a new mode of transit would be available, but aside from that (because I never faced those problems) it is a good game for the "trafficly minded".

First off, they got so many different missions each mission is different in a way that it makes each city feel unique. Depending on what mode you choose, they start you out with a limited number of Mass transit vehicles, each with different passenger capacities. As the game progresses and you start making more money and making people happy, more advanced vehicles start coming in. They have everything from 10 passenger transit vans to 20-40 passenger basic buses, 30 & 45 passenger hydro-diesel buses, 80 passenger double decker buses, even a special 15 passenger hydro electric shuttle bus (way later in the game), different types of LRV's (Light rail vehicles--trolleys, trams, etc...), Heavy rail, Monorail, and suspension trains... you name it

Missions include making a certain amount of money in a certain period of time, or reaching a certain company value in a certain time period and stuff like that.

Buildings come from all over, they have lots of medieval looking buildings that give some of the cities a unique blend because they do a good job mixing the historic with the contemporary (modern). As for city types, they have so many different types and sometimes, they'll give you only a certain district of a big city to play with. But overall, there are urban areas, suburban, industrial, tourist-oriented, downtowns, residential areas, some residential areas with tall co-op apartment buildings with hundreds of people trying to get on your buses, rural areas with small towns spread out, I can't name them all off the top of my head but there are a lot.

Of course, the more buses you have on your map, the slower the speed will run. The computer I use to play this game isn't all that great, but the game works perfectly on it. When I start having about 25 bus routes, with maybe 7 buses on each route, thats when it starts slowing down. Another good thing though is that you even get to name your bus routes, and the route name doesn't have to match the name of the street the bus travels on so you can use your imagination.

In a way, this game can help you in real life with things like budgeting or how hard it is to keep a transit system running well. Like in the game, you do have the choice of placing only a sign at a bus stop outside a large apartment block or a heated bus shelter near a farm... its up to you but obviously one would be a big waste, the other- a big nusciance. Another big (real life) nusciance is waiting 20 minutes for a "frequent" bus and then 3 of them come in a row. The game even lets you control things like this so each of the buses come evenly

The bad part. Only things that suck about this game is how when you have too many buses on the screen at one time, it starts slowing down [but i guess that depends on the computer].
If you play this game for the first time, then its gonna be kinda tough getting used to the menus and all because the instructions are all in symbols but its simple tho.
Also, they need a part 2 where everything, includin the graphics, would be advanced and it would be even better if you'd be able to create your own city. The graphics ain't bad now, but an advanced version would be better. But overall, I like the game.

This game's great!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: July 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

i downloaded a demo for this game and i must say that it is great. It is extremely engrossing and i cant stop playing this game. it has almost no cons, but the only thing i find annoying is the bus accidents. Even though there are a lot of limitations in the demo, its still fun to play. the graphics are great, but the soundtrack could do with some improvement, as i have noticed with the demo. But if anyone is thinking about buying this game, then i would surely recommend it, and its definitely woth it!

Great Game with lots of Problems... Don't buy it!!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: September 26, 2001
Author: Amazon User

After playing this game several times, I found it to be a lot of fun, but then it started having problems. It randomly freezes or crashes with no explanation. If you check the JoWood website you can see in their support forum that this is a problem that many are having and that is being ignored. This really shows a problem on their part.

One of my favorites

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: February 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Hey-The first day I got this, I spent 2 hours playing and got past 2 levels. Its challenging, but not that challenging that you get so frusterated that you cant bea tthe level....Its 5/10 on how hard it is-Fun, i give it a 9/10-Let me get you better understanding on what you do-Your the manager of a citys transportation-You can sit and watch the city from overview and watch where people go and all that junk, or you can build bus routes. This means you but a bus stop at every spot you want the bus to stop. So basiclly your making the route. You buy the bus and then you set the ticket prices, how much you pay the drivers (the more you pay the better driver and the friendlyer they will be)-You see if one stop has 40 people and another has 2, you can build another bus route in that same spot to make waiting time lower. You do the same exact things with trains!!! Overall, I highly suggest this game, i am having lots of fun with it, it was completly worth the money! Randy

Great Game with crash problem

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Trust the other guy's review and mine: This game crash without reasons. This is an addictive and fun game, but it is so annoying that it keeps crashing my computer. Buy it at your own risk.

Good game, but needs some fixing

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: February 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

In Traffic Giant, you get to run busses, trams (streetcars), trains, suspended monorails and mag-levs. The cities are very detailed and the game is hard to tear yourself away from. It is similar to "SimCity" (so I have heard), but Traffic Giant focuses on the transportation. I had always wanted a game that combined trains and buses into one, and I guess I've found it. The videos are cool, too, and many times I just want to watch the videos and nothing else! But the game itself is very fun.

I would have rated this game 5 stars overall except it has a few problems. The main one, as you have read in other reviews, is that it freezes constantly. There isn't any reason for it crashing, either. You're just playing the game and then right out of the blue, the sounds stop and everything freezes. You can't activate any of the buttons or even get out of it with CTRL-ALT-DELETE! So you have to shut down the computer the wrong way and of course that's bad. Although different times the game does different things. Sometimes it freezes and sometimes it doesn't. But I've observed many times that Traffic Giant freezes at the year 6, EVERY TIME, preventing your step-up to trains, monorails and mag-levs! So I had to go into the game's files and change them so all the vehicles could be bought at the year 0. It's a pain, but it's not that bad when you're expecting it. I also heard that the patches on trafficgiant.com don't fix it either. I havn't tried any of them, but they probably don't.

Don't get this game. Wait until Transport Giant comes to this country. It's about the same thing, it's got more to offer, and it looks extremely updated.

Best game in a long time.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: May 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is the best thing to happen to the U.S. in a long time. It'l teach people that there are other fun ways of getting around besides the automobile. America's love affair with the automobile has been the worst thing for the environment, and has created gridlock unimaginable 30 years ago. Traffic Giant will give us a new way of thinking.(a better and smarter one) Thank you JoWood.

Great concept, but it's full of bugs!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 12
Date: June 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

After successfully installing this game and downloading the latest patch from the website.. version 1.3. I got the game up and running. Unfortunately only half of the game works. There are two distict play modes: Campaign and Endless. Only the Campaign works, the Endless portion does not successfully load and leaves your system hanging without a possibility of shutting the application down. You have to unplug your system and do a harsh reboot with all of your fancy utilities checking the system for errors. It's a real pain.

I've emailed the company which is located in Austria. Of course their technical support only works three hours a day Monday through Thursday. Nevertheless, my email has remained unanswered.

Another unfortunate problem is that you get a small bus to start out with and all of the other transportation options that appeared to be available when I bought this aren't there. Some games give you a limited supply of technology and take you through some time while improvements and new options become available. This game must have some kind of bug in it because I've played the Campaign version for hours and can't get any other options. I have a small 10 person capacity bus with hundred of people waiting at bustops that can't get on the stupid thing.

Great graphics and sound though, and if it were'nt for the play difficulites and other bugs I would consider this game to be a fantastic innovation is business strategy games. Intead.. A BIG THUMBS DOWN! Don't waste your money, the company is foreign and you won't get your money back because it's software.

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