Life Aboard the International Space Station

There have been a number of space station sim games over the years, but in the past most have been firmly of the tycoon game style--that is, primarily about building modules and expanding your station, with some notional flow of dollars increasing if you do it well. SpaceStationSim takes a somewhat different approach; it's more of a hybrid of a life sim (the granddaddy there being The Sims) and a tycoon game. You create an astronaut, and the gameplay involves both building out your station and satisfying the needs of your crew. Which includes, naturally, things like making sure they have enough to eat and time for potty breaks--and also enough to breathe. Life on the final frontier isn't always easy.

Real E$tate Empire is a charming sim/tycoon game in which, as you might expect, you buy houses, spruce them up, and flip them for profit. While intended primarily for the 'casual' game market (with the cartoony and brightly colored graphics this implies), it has a surprising degree of depth, and we suspect that the developer has done some real estate investing himself.

The developer, Lennard Feddersen, like many who contribute games to this site, is a refugee from the conventional game industry. With NES and PC games from major publishers to his credit, he's now working to make a living doing games that interest him.

Real E$tate Empire is, like most casual games, a hard game to lose--you have to imagine that it's set someplace like Southern California, where real estate prices have increased almost every year for decades. People living in, say, St. Louis, may simply find it depressing. But most should find it fun, and perhaps even educational to a degree.

Tycoon Games are Fun Again

Kaloki is a classic sim/tycoon game; here, instead of running a theme park or a railroad, you're running something like Babylon Five, a small trading station in space, with starships showing up and wanting to buy stuff. You build out from your space station core, balancing power and structural needs against the desire to have as many profit-making enterprises as possible.

Along the way, goofy alien characters talk to you, and you're faced with a progression of levels, each with their own challenge, in the classic tycoon-game fashion. But the dialog is fun, the tone light and entertaining, and you never get sunk into the tedium of some tycoon games, where meeting the demands of a particular level requires a lot of grinding labor.