All It Takes Is a Little Ingenuity
Friday, March 17, 2006; Page WE43
The simulation "Geniu$: The Tech Tycoon Game" will tax your brain. You start in 1850 as part owner of a bicycle shop. You can choose different cities to put down roots, with Pittsburgh being the easiest because of flat land and plenty of resources.
  Staying on top of technology is key in "Geniu$: The Tech Tycoon Game." (Viva-media) |
You have to build infrastructure such as roads and rails. You also have to build cottages for your staff to live in, coal mines to get resources and factories. But you can't live on bicycle sales alone. Eventually you must research new technologies.
You do that by completing tasks in scientific areas, such as optics, electricity, thermodynamics, astronomy and mechanics. For example, someone may try to pay you for goods using gold coins. You then must research the density of different metals and weight of the coins to determine if they are real.
You get your research by subscribing to scientific journals delivered to your office. You also can correspond with famous scientists around the world, including Carl Zeiss and Rudolf Diesel. Occasionally they will contact you with a business proposal, and, by performing more scientific tasks, you can invent technologies and products such as motorcycles and steam engines. Eventually you can even get into rocketry.
Although most of the tasks are easy if you get the right formula from the journals, occasionally the game throws something at you that should be on an entrance exam for MIT. Determining the speed of a piston or the efficiency of a locomotive involves the use of fairly complex calculations. My desk began to get littered with so many papers containing various formulas that it looked like a scene from the movie "A Beautiful Mind." Winning challenges normally gives you money. Lose too often and you won't be able to pay your workers, which pretty much ends your game.
-- John Breeden II
Geniu$: The Tech Tycoon Game Everyone, PC Windows 98/2000/XP ($30) Viva-Media
