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I've noticed one of the things that kills a park is research and in particular the leftmost research bar: If you take it before getting all the rides, it'll skip upgrading the rides you've yet to get and you'll lose the chance to upgrade them altogether, but if you research it last, it somehow bugs out the game and tanks your stock price over a couple of years until it goes to 0 and you lose, which effectively puts you on a timer. So what you might want to try is to just skip that research bar, or at the very least experiment with stopping the process before it's finished, and maybe you can find out where and when it bugs the game out!

@@tolo84 your current rides become worthless, even replacing them will not replicate their prior value. Ticket prices drop and you relie heavily on your shops & visitor. The larger ride capacity needs to be utilised to facilitate larger buses, it gets to the stage a double decker will fill up 2 clown acts, and they all need to buy a steak dinner, have a drink at the saloon aswell as playing in the arcade. I use the balloons and novelty shop as a way to monitor how far people got around the park by seeing what people have at the bus stop, I know if they have a gray balloon they completed the left circuit & a blue if it was the right one, hopefully they'll have both.

I've found that ticket prices eventually turn into the best way to empty visitors of money, for three main reasons: Firstly, You get every single visitor instantly paying on the path around the park without detouring, waiting in line or stopping, creating litter or creating a need for toilets. That's better than any shop or concession stand. Secondly, the overhead is 100% since there's nothing you have to keep in stock and there's no base price that's also affected by inflation. So at the point where you empty the pockets of every visitor, the only value you can keep squeezing out of your park is raising your overhead, I.E. raising your prices for food/drinks/toys, or by doing my preferred way: Let them pay everything up front and pocket 100% of it! Also, the way the game is programmed, you can actually extract more money from a visitor than they have through raised ticket prices, so effectively your overhead could turn out to be more than 100%, and if your park is filled with enough rides, entertainers and trees, visitors won't mind paying more than they have! Thirdly, you don't have to stress around with the stock screen to keep things in stock all the time. This helps your peace of mind, helps you focus on working on other attention-intensive tasks, and you can avoid the stock screen which can (and will) cause the game to crash.

Cool, I've heard of that game! Looks really interesting, and being a big fan of FMV games, it'll definitely get played once I get a hold of it. Got a couple of oldies lined up that I want to get through, like Simon the Sorceror and Commander Blood (another FMV, albeight more of a talking puzzle game than point & click), but they're fairly short, so I might be able to get Dark Side of the Moon running sharpish!

@@tolo84 they sound great! I can't wait to watch them :)

Those damned flying turds never knew what hit them!

That makes it sound very interesting, perhaps I'll play that after this! Would you mind posting a youtube link or website?

Must've been an incredible experience! This is a game that really flew under the radar for me, but to have played it in the mid 90's would've definitely made a big impression. Really glad to have played it, hope you liked the longplay!

@@shankao right? So relaxing to watch!

Thank you so much! I hope you find both old favourites and new among my playthroughs, and that they can entertain you throughout! Lately the games have tended to run a bit long :)

@@tolo84 I very much look forward to binging! Always nice to fine a long playthrough to drift off to dreamland to!

For sure! Just the intro sets the mood incredibly well and shows what you're in for. I think the main problems that kept the game from greatness were threefold: That it lacked cutscenes or any meaningful connective tissue between missions, which was something that had really started taking off at this point in time; that it was released in 96 among a killer lineup of other amazing games; and finally that the gameplay was very unforgiving and uneven, which makes it difficult to really get into and therefore people never got to experience the superb setting, sound and graphics. Would have loved an expansion pack or something like it, which could've introduced some characters, set up at more traditional storytelling and added cutscenes. Could've even turned into a cyberpunk variety of Vampire The Masquerade, with syndicates instead of clans. Bullfrog just wasn't really interested though it seems.

If its close to this game, it could be Panzer General 2 or People's General. Both of them came out after this and had some improved graphics with cutscenes between missions.

@@tolo84 thx! my game mainly focuses on navy(ships & submarines, barely airforce or army). I did research all games of this developer and found that mine still had better graphics lol. Probably mine is 2000+

That's really interesting, I'll have a look and see if I can find any game that fits those parameters and get back to you. If you discover what the game was, I'd be interested in it, too!

Czy przeszedłeś tę grę, kiedy była popularna w latach 90.?

@@tolo84 nie , nie grałem nigdy w to ale tytuł znam pamiętam screeny z gazety ,coś kojaże że ta gra miała coś wspólnego z dagerfall w którego grałem pamiętam dużo gier z początku lat 90 najlepsze gry. Do dziś gram w syndicate wars i magic carpet nawet ostatnio udalo mi sie uruchomić fighting force i nuclear strike

Wszystkie to świetne gry!

Yeah, that's the right perspective to approach the game with in my opinion. I don't know how much shorter it would be if all the answers were just given, I bet we'd be done in less than half the time!

The shortlist of "most timeless classics" would hold little meaning to me if this game wasn't on it!

It's great, isn't it? Love that you get a lot more time on each scenario compared to Panzer General, where it feels like you either have to know beforehand how to play or stress through in order to win. If you own the original discs, then I'd say it's more than ok to download the game and play it on modern systems, since you've done your due diligence and payed for it. If you want, it's available to play on modern PC's from this website: panzergeneraldownload.com/

@@tolo84 i tried to download the 1997 disc. It didn't. Sad

Just the disc might be tough to get running, as the installer and original game exe might require an unsupported system architecture or somesuch. However, the full 1.1 version should start after just downloading, extracting and running! One big issue it has is that it won't run if the file path is too long, meaning you need to run the game from something like "D:\Pacgen" or "C:\games\Pacgen". If you extract it in your downloads folder, it'll refuse to start altogether

@@tolo84 i will try again tomorrow. I will get back to you. Thanks.

I've been recording with Xbox Game bar. It came with Windows 10 I think and it's been working really well so far. The only thing is it sometimes stops recording without telling you, so every hour or so you got to save and stop to see if everything's fine or not!

Haha yeah but there is good reason for it! Last year I had massive computer hardware malfunction and haven't been able to replace it, so what I'm currently able to do is to play after work, produce an hour of video during the night and then publish it in the morning before leaving home. Any more than an hour and the video editing program will start having a fit, and to free up hard drive space I'm unable to record much more than an hour at a time anyway! So at the moment it's a bit of a weird cut, but once next video is published then it should be more of a seamless transition.

@@tolo84 Aye, I suspected as much. At least you have a good rhythm going!

Well, you don't get veterans without sending in rookies

I see what you're saying and I'm not making a value judgment about it in any way. I've actually begun wanting to play around with it for the really cool mods that are out there. However, it's not XCOM, it's OpenXCOM, it's just a different thing. All the fixes, quality of life changes and improvements, by definition, make it no longer XCOM in my view. The way I see it, you play OpenXCOM *because* it changes things from the actual game, be it customized loadouts, smoke grenade fixes or the ability to open doors or whatever it may be. I'm going to have a lot of fun experimenting with that, but none of those things are in XCOM. Here I just want to show the actual original game in all its glory and with all its flaws, because to me, the flaws are just as much a part of XCOM as the great parts.

@@tolo84 "All the fixes, quality of life changes and improvements, by definition, make it no longer XCOM in my view.". All of the things you went on to list are OPTIONAL. If your actual opinion is that bug fixes make it "no longer XCom"... Small wonder no ones watching.

It felt magical though, once it actually started running, right? In 94 I got a game called Dominus, but it just *would not run* because of some EMS or XMS allocation requirement. Took almost 2 years to find someone who knew how to do it, but oh man was it a great feeling finally playing that game!

Hey thanks for watching! Always great to find fellow Krondor appreciaters, as it really is a great adventure!

@@tolo84 I've only seen screens of it back then and was so stocked, unfornunately I've never had the chance to play it. I'm actually discovering it with your videos loo

To be honest, I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to setting up dosbox. I tried the old GOG version with speeding up the cycles, but it seems to just put the normal parts in hyperspeed but keep the slow parts unchanged. Perhaps we can call it a retro feel? :P

@@tolo84 Ah I see. Why then you don't want to play through OpenXcom? If you leave the settings unchanged there's literally no difference in the game.

@@krzysztofpaszkiewicz1274 I'll definitely start using it from here on out, as being able to play with mods seems like a lot of fun!

Новый уровень инопланетных технологий! ))

It's a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg situation I've created for myself. Initially the idea was to speed up the early game by ignoring casualties entirely and rehiring until reaching the mid- to late game, where stats start to really matter. Since most of my soldiers will have really low health, low armor, low accuracy and low... well, everything, I thought it'd be an interesting idea to just chuck 'nades and fire explosives to negate the fact that my guys couldn't hit a house from the inside. Then later on, I can just hire a hundred people and pick out a crew with great stats and equip it straight away. Now I'm in a bit of a pickle though because the base is so full of bombs and other throwables, and if your guys have bombs in their inventory then the AI can equip, arm and throw them. It's working out for two reasons, namely the tight closed spaces make for great alien bombing efficacy, and it doesn't matter if half the base is blown away on a mission because it doesn't carry over to the overworld map.

You know, I've listened to it a dozen times and can't make it out either! :D "Your park is..." a-buildin'? Ability? A building? A bidding? Perhaps it's meant to be ambigious? Turns out my park is a b...*VRRRRRROOOOOM*

Пусть тела павших товарищей станут их прикрытием! :D

@@tolo84 )))

It's actually a trick I learned from my older brother. He used that to beat both this and Terror From The Deep without learning psi powers!

If you manage to save it during the orc ambush when it's first encountered in the vampire campaign, I believe it'll eventually follow you all the way here

I agree, it's a very niche type of thing the way I do it now. It would be cool to complement a full longplay with some spot-check videos. Personally I love the idea of making shorter videos with specific subjects in mind but honestly, it's a matter of not having the time, software and hardware to properly produce a themed video on a specific game topic. For Theme Park for instance, I'd love to make like a 14 minute commentary on the way to play it successfully, like a walkthrough type deal of how to beat a map. It'd also be cool to make a video on the bugs, what breaks the game, how they show up and what you need to do to avoid them. Maybe a comparative video on this and other Theme games weighed against the Tycoon and Sim series, that'd be pretty awesome. If I ever manage to build a computer that can render a video in less than 4+ hours, or when I run out of the current "to play" list, you'll most likely see some more mainstream-focused content showing up here :) It could be fun doing a video review series of these games for instance, and that'd garner a lot more attention for sure!

Thanks! I would recommend the game more though if it wasn't so tough to get running properly, but that problem could honestly be a skill issue on my part when it comes to setting up a virtual machine :) With the proper real hardware, this is absolutely worth a try because it's a truly positive experience.

With a little patience and effort, it's one of the most rewarding retro gaming experiences ever! A lot of more modern developers have tried replicating this game without fully realizing what it is. It's not just a tactical turnbased strategy, you don't really play it to beat the final boss and get the credits, even though the gameplay itself is really fun and rewarding too. It's a sci fi horror-comedy first, and the greatness of it is playing for its developing narrative. The thematics are unbeatable, especially with the context that this game is built on! 90's Conspiracy theories, X-Files and 50's-80's science fiction films. It just hits those notes perfectly!

One of the best games of all time as far as I'm concerned!

​@@tolo84 have you played any openxcom mods?

I haven't yet, but I've been recommended a really interesting-looking one called Piratez that I'll try out after this run. There's also a Warhammer 40k one that looks really good. If you know more just let me know, cause I'm sure there are tons I'm missing!

I heard Piratez gets a bit naughty xD I'll have to try it and the 40k mod sometime I played xcom xfiles a few years ago which was fun. It adds prequel content where you start with only a couple of agents investigating strange happenings, before progressing to the main ufo defence game. Solaz has been streaming a mod for tftd called The Terrifying World of Silence which looks pretty fun too.