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Looks like nobody tested this game for bugs at Global Star!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 14
Date: January 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I am a big fan of simulation games - especially those which end in 'Tycoon'!

I guess I should have paid more attention to the other folks who wrote reviews for this game because I went ahead and purchased Airline Tycoon 3, thinking naively "2 should be better than 1, and 3 should be better than 2". I can't comment on 1 and 2 because I don't own copies of them, (and unless someone reassures me that they are much better than 3), and don't intend to own them, or anything from Global Star.

Let me tell you what I found annoying/ disappointing in this game:

1) Other games have simulations that run as tutorials, here you just get the privilege of reading the manual in an electronic form!

2) The English needs work - "Plain" Maintenance for heaven's sake! Other examples which I can't recall right now. Someone needs to actually LOOK at what is being displayed to give the game in my view, a 'finished' look.

3) Once you place a terminal building there is no way of removing it.

4) Ditto for the runway. Except of course when you try to delete a runway you are told you cannot delete it. We can still see it after the deleted attempt, but the game has decided that the runway has been deleted, and we are stuck with the message that the airport cannot be operated without a runway!

Due to 3 and 4, I found myself quitting the game again and again in order to correct my mistakes. This got old very quickly and I found myself sailing the CD across the room vowing never to buy anything from Global Star ever again.

A message to the folks at Global Star: TEST your software...your competitors are allegedly doing this!

Don't buy this game, it doesn't work

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 16
Date: January 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I was given this as a gift for Christmas. Essentially the game installed and I began to play it. To my suprise, I had problems with non stop crashing of the program do to a scenary bug. Some features do not work as listed in the manual. The manual contains little to no usefull information and is completely outdated (just look at the pictures, they do not match what you get in the game). I have made contact with what limited support they have and they are of absolute no help. They will not answer your specific questions and tell you to get the latest patch which was the first thing I did anyway. It is simply broken.

Don't Bother

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: January 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This "game" is probably one of the most frustrating, buggy, and annoying money pits you will ever have the displeasure of playing. I made the mistake of seeing this in the discount bin and picking it up; I could've used the $10 on something more enjoyable, like an enema.

The list of missteps here is long and entertaining:

1) There is no way to learn how to play the game without trial and error. The "tutorial" is a series of blurry screenshots that offers nothing of value. Things like: You need most buildings to face an apron to be functional. You need to place a taxiway adjacent to the runway, and then a planestand adjacent to the taxiway.

2) The scenarios, all 2 of them, are so ridiculously easy a blind monkey could figure them out in a couple tries.

3) There is no way to improve the passenger experience except to place plants everywhere inside the terminal. It doesn't matter if they can't move in there, as long as it's green.

4) The contracts come in slowly. I'm not kidding. You will go weeks in the game (5-10 minutes real time) before you're offered a contract. And you'd might as well accept it without any changes because the changes you ask won't matter. The economic system would make a third world Communist country look like a global superpower. In other words, there is no economic system. It's completely inept. What do I mean? You can't borrow money, but you spend up to negative $5 million with no repercussions. After that, you will earn maybe $10,000 a month with 50 contracts in place. Do the math - you will never make money in this game. It's so completely out of whack it's amazing - and appalling that this is a "professional" release.

5) The sounds become immediately grating. For instance, when a contract comes in, you're alerted by a buzzer and a red flashing light. Of course, if your sound is off because of the annoying Euro-trash techno music, then you'll probably miss the red light because it's literally the size of a pinprick and the "news alert" box doesn't scroll down, it just writes over itself. If you zoom in, you'll get a couple vehicle-appropriate sounds, but it just loops over and over like a bad Groundhog Day scene.

5) Someone with a 3rd grade English education proofread the game. Seriously. It's atrocious. Granted, I'm no Hemingway, but if I'm asking people to buy my product, I should have someone read it, right? It begs the question: Did anyone actually play this game before packing it up and shipping it off?

I could go on, but suffice it to say, no matter what you do, do not buy this game. Look in the same discount bin this game is probably located and pick up any old school Sid Meier, Maxis or PopTop game and you will have infinitely more fun. When/If Airport Tycoon 4 comes out, I'd cast a wary eye on these guys, because I simply would not trust any company that saw fit to release this turkey way before it's time.

I hope Global Star reads this!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: December 31, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have A.T.1 and it is awsome I still play it. I really wanted part 3 and now that I got it, it is really bad. I downloaded a trainer off the web for unlimited money, but after I downloaded the patch for the game from global star the trainer doesn't work. I can not make any money and I always go bankrupt. Who evens knows how to charge airlines to land at your airport? You can't expand your terminal or destory it to build a bigger on. Until Global Star can figure out how to fix all the problems This CD will be a frisbee for my dog!

FULL OF BUGS

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: January 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I concur with the frustrations experienced by the other reviewers. In addition, I have experienced numerous software crashes when playing a previous "saved" game. Also, why is it when I add a bus station, the annoying tool tip says "I don't have enough bus stops". I deceided one time to play that game and add as many bus stops as I could fit. Yet I still received the message. To top it off, the program indicated that I had a 0% utilization of all my bus stops. What maddness!!

Improvement....yet still lacking in quality.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 11
Date: March 26, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I've played all three Airport Tycoon games, and I think the only hope is for another company to pick up the title and completely remake it from the ground up. AT3 is an improvement over the previous versions, but it's still bad. Previous reviewers have said it runs slow. In gameplay, yes it does run a bit on the slow side, but so have a lot of the other "tycoon" and "sim" games out there. I have to admit that after about an hour I did have a pretty nice little airport, which was making a profit and expanding at a comfortable rate, but this is only possible if you run the game at maximum speed. I'm running it on a 3GHz P4 with a pretty nice graphics card, and had no problems with the graphics speed at all. I wouldn't say the graphics are too bad, but they're so disproportionate. How can fuel trucks be bigger than the airplanes they're refueling? Why is the runway the same width as the entire terminal? There is only one size of plane stand, so whether you're flying in little commuter planes, or big heavies, the ramp space they take up is always the same. You can't demolish an old runway after building another longer one. The tutorial is terrible, and there are many things you just have to figure out through trial and error (and spending precious funds). There are so many little things that are annoying in this game, it makes it hard to enjoy. For example, if you're adding trees to the landscape, you can't just click the icon once and build a bunch of them. You have to go back and reselect the tree icon after every one you build. This is obviously a low-budget game, which didn't have the luxury of good testing before it went to market, or experienced programmers. There are numerous spelling errors in the game, as previously mentioned, and now it's starting to crash on me (I've had it installed for three hours). This title has SO much potential if a good software company would pick up the idea and throw some good developers, testers, and a little money into it. It has the potential to be another "SimCity" or "Rollercoaster Tycoon" if it was just done better. But, the problems with this version are so glaring (especially now with memory errors and crashes), I just couldn't justify more than one star.

Don't Waste your money!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: March 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The airport tycoon games just getting worse and worse as the come out with new versions.

Possibly the worst game I've ever played

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: May 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Title says it all, this is without a doubt the worst game I have ever had the misfortune of playing. Let me correct that: its the worst game I've ever TRIED to play. Total gameplay time before I gave up in disgust was 45 minutes.

The manual is useless, the "tutorial" is simply a bunch of blurry screen shots with the same "content" as the printed manual. Worse, the tutorial fails to cover some of the most basic items in gameplay: how to connect various objects so that they are useable would be most helpfull. Things that should be intuitive, like how to rotate an object, are only accomplished through trial and error. Worse, even when you get it all hooked up correctly, it takes 10 minutes of gametime for your first airplane to show up. No, you're not doing anything wrong, that's just how it works.

I could go on and on, but I don't want to spend more time writing a review for this waste of money than I actually spent "playing" it.

Bottom line: save your money. This game isn't worth playing even if they were giving it away.

Don't even bother...... Read the other reviews

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: June 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is a disgrace. It is a total deception for global star, and I hope they read this because I ame never ever going to buy another game from Global star.

The game grafics are ok but the game is imposible to handle.
First of all the view option dont even let you see your own airport. Then when I cant do anything about the view and I give up trying to fix it I build the specified things inorder for the airport to open, but the game remains paused. IT IS FULL OF BUGS. BAck to the views; whenever I change view options and then return to the normal viewmode, the normal view mode is compleatly at another view.
This game is a disgrace to tycoon games and I Hope Global Star will never produce a game. ITS A WASTE OF TIME and MONEY...

Make sure your computer fits standards.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: July 19, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game seemed like it would be really really great, if only it worked. My computer, being slightly older than up-to-date, did not let me play the game. The 'video card' thingy was not the right format to run this game. So before you buy this game, make sure your video card fits the standards. Otherwise, you'll waste 20 bucks like I did.

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