Thoughts by faceman-bjk (13 00 2012) – PC (DOS)
Ah, Pizza Connection! A gem from the German biz sim wave of the early 90s which, above everything, impresses with its immensely varied (legal and illegal) possible activities.
Plot
In Pizza Connection, you take over the role of a pizza baker who goes from his first small pizza place to an empire of branches spanning all over Europe. Of course, the Mafia has always be taken into account in this line of business and so you will not only occupy yourself with baking pizzas and managing your staff and furnishing your restaurant, but you can even visit your competition and leave them a nice little present (like a stink bomb).
Each milestone of your career (like opening your first restaurant, your first week of reaching full capacity etc.) is rewarded by a nicely drawn static picture and it will be entered in your CV. This is the basis of ‘mission mode’ in which it is your goal to follow a given CV (meaning you have to reach certain goals at specific times) while is ‘free mode’, you can just bake in any way you like.
Gameplay
In Pizza Connection, you take over all aspects related to building up your restaurant yourself. From selecting the location of your restaurant (including size, buying versus renting and so on), the furnishing (ovens, seats, decoration), hiring and training your staff (cooks, waiters, managers) to buying the necessary ingredients (quality, price, supply contracts) and creating your own round tomato bread.
Unlike the dry text listings found in other biz sims of the time, all these things happen in different logically structured parts which could almost be called mini games. For example, you contact banks, real estate agents or mayors via your video phone and you interact with them through dialogue options. Baking pizza, on the other hand, is done by manually by putting toppings on a pre-made dough wheel. If you decide to wreak havoc in one of your competitor’s restaurants at night, you can walk around the lovingly decorated place with a rocket launcher (in top down view) and if you want your newspaper ads to be effective, you have to construct a meaningful slogan out of given parts.
All this makes the game very varied, but it also consumes a lot of time. The way to your all-European restaurant chain is a long one and Pizza Connection certainly is no game for just a lunch break.
The well-done menus make for a newcomer-friendly introduction. Later in the game, the only weaknesses concern the limited choice of personnel, which makes training more or less mandatory, and the overwhelming micro management, which you can decrease a little bit with some of the available options (managers, supply contracts), but this automation never reaches the same level of perfection as manually handling all of it.
The underworld part is funny, but it is a bit too easy in my view. Once you’ve got enough starting capital (through legal or illegal channels), you can make so much money with so few clicks in the illegal weapons business that you could even give your pizzas away for free.
Graphics
The comic graphics are entertaining and they manage to set the perfect mood. The heads of the people you are talking to (mayor, suppliers, weapons dealers etc.) are caricatures of (then) well-known personalities, which increases the fun even more, especially combined with the smutty company names. The permanent gratification of various achievements with nice pictures keeps the motivation high. Above all, Pizza Connection is colourful!
Sound & Music
The sound effects are limited to a few samples for certain actions as well as background noise (traffic, mumbling in the restaurants). Solid, but nothing special.
Music only appears in the restaurant view and even there only after purchasing a jukebox. The pieces are well selected and nice at first, but after listening to them for the 20th time, they can get on your nerves, of course.
Maybe this is not such a huge achievement, but if you play Pizza Connection without sound, you will notice quickly that the seemingly superfluous background sounds are actually important for the overall impression. Even just dialing a number without the accompanying sound will drive you crazy. Pizza Connection’s sound may not be anything special, but it is still an important part of the atmosphere which is mainly – but not exclusively – built up by the funny graphics.
Technical sidenote: In the German PC version, Pizza Connection uses an exotic sound driver which makes it close to impossible to get the sound working in an emulator like Dosbox or VirtualPC. If you’d like to play the game on a modern PC, using the emulated Amiga version is recommended.
Conclusion
There is hardly any other business simulation which offers such detailed control over all aspects of the selected subject. But Pizza Connection is more than that; it will also motivate you for a long time through its funny and clear presentation. However, Pizza Connection is no game to play during a short break. Even a moderately active game will consume much more time than a game of Civilization, for example. This turns the multiplayer mode (hot seat) into a rather theoretical option, because the time you’d need for such a game would just be too much.
Translated by Mr Creosote
Thoughts by NetDanzr (18 00 2006) – Pizza Tycoon – PC (DOS)
Pizza Tycoon is not only the original tycoon game that started a whole niche, but also one of the best ones. It had all: a relatively simple concept, a mix of several gaming styles, money and property management and cartoonish graphics. Add to it tacky music, several amusing sub-games and several ways to make money, and you have something that should be hardly bearable to a hardcore gamer. However, include a very deep business strategy, mix it all together, and suddenly you have a very decent game that everybody would like.
In this game, you assume the role of the owner of a small pizza place. Your task is to eliminate the competition and spread across the globe. Actually, your goal is whatever you wish it to be; once you enter the gaming world, it is up to you what you want to do. As the name suggests, however, your first task will most likely be to build a working pizza restaurant.
At the beginning, you will take care of everything. You will have to select a location for your pizzeria. There are several cities to choose from, with several districts, each of which has its own demographic profile and tastes, which you have to take into account. You will have to find an empty store and either rent or buy it. Then it’s up to shopping: you have to equip the kitchen and furnish the dining room. At any point, you will be able to check how much people like the furnishing; the higher the rating, the more customers will show up. After hiring the staff – a cook, waiter and possibly a manager (all of which have their own set of statistics), you are up for the fun part: creating your pizzas. There are several recipes in the manual, all of which should be reproduced for the basic menu. In the pizza creation menu, you will be presented with an empty pizza cake, and every possible topping. You can chop it, arrange on the pizza and serve. If you get good at it, you will be able to enter competitions in pizza creation, held on a monthly basis. After you are done with the menu, you shop for all the raw materials and it’s time to open your shop.
Within a few days in operation, however, something happens. A few thugs will come in and tell you that it’s beneficial for your health to pay them protection money. You already are in deep debt due to all the loan sharks out there, and your restaurant is not yet profitable, so paying protection money may be more painful than getting trashed. You realize, however, that there is a whole another set of business relations taking place in the underworld, and decide to join. You contact the mafia yourself, and offer your services. You start out with transporting items, then move on to trading in arms and more. As long as you are careful and don’t get caught, this line of business is very profitable. In addition, for each successful job you rise in the ranks of the mafia, and soon become important enough to have the thugs pay to you instead of you paying them. You will be able to bomb competing establishments to eliminate competition, and before you know, you are not only the mafia boss, but also the pizza king.
This is in short the story of Pizza Tycoon. As good as the gameplay sounds, it is also highly unbalanced. I have been playing the game for years now, but never succeeded in becoming profitable by legal means. This means that those gamers who prefer to play only the legal way will be at a disadvantage. To make matters worse, the illegal way is not too easy, either. It is highly profitable, but a single arrest, especially early into the game, will cost you dearly, probably too much to continue playing. The main problem here is that whether you get caught or not is determined by the time you accept a mafia job, and you will have no way of knowing it. As such, you will end up saving and loading games all the time, only to prevent getting arrested. Pizza Tycoon 2 has solved this problem by a small arcade sequence where you have to avoid police cars to get to your place of delivery, giving you the chance to be the master of your own destiny. This is not possible in this game, though.
As for the technology in the game, it could hardly be any better. The graphics are a little too cute for my taste, but very detailed, and colorful enough for the player to always have an easy time locating what he wants. Several zoom levels in the town overview, as well as several filters resembling those in SimCity also help. The only part I don’t like about the graphics is the attempt at humor. The designers apparently thought it funny to attach some strange faces to some of the characters. There is Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and a few more, either in the role of loan sharks or the policemen. I could live without them. The music is a little tacky, but never in the way enough to be obnoxious. The interface is mouse-based, and even though the time flows in the game as you play, the interface is very easy and fast to use.
Overall, Pizza Tycoon is a fine piece of work. At the time it was released, the game offered something new and unique. The gameplay, while unbalanced was great fun, and the graphics and sound improved the game even further. Pizza Tycoon deserves its place in the gaming hall of fame not only for the fun it provided, but also for the fact that this simple game kick started one of the hottest niches of these days – the tycoon genre.
