A masterpiece from the hands of Chris Sawyer, Transport Tycoon Deluxe offers you the chance to build up and maintain a sophisticated transport network, while dumping rivals and watching the cash roll in. Running a transport network may sound boring, but in fact, even from someone who isn't usually into games like this, the whole experience is great fun. What helps is that the user interface is extremely intuitive, making the game easy to pick up and play straight away for the first-time player.
Graphics are excellent (for 1994, that is), and even the cheesy score is right on the mark. The game mainly consists of putting in place road, rail, air and sea routes in real time. A large map is dotted with various businesses and towns, and the player lays rail or roads (or builds airports/docks) etc. between towns and towns, factories and farms, coal pits and power stations etc. Then trains/ planes/ ships /trucks have to be bought to haul whatever needs hauling along your routes. Once a route is set up, you will begin raking in cash, to spend on more routes and vehicles.
Advancements in technology continually update the available methods of transport (the game begins in 1950). At the start of the game you will
be using dodgy steam trains and unreliable, small and slow planes, but as the years progress better modes of transport become available, quicker and bigger, making your routes much more profitable.
The real-time nature of the game makes things quite frenetic - you're always trying to build a new railway line, for instance, but have to negotiate obstacles like hills and lakes, and meanwhile, somewhere else on your network, a coal-mine will have doubled production, requiring more train carriages to carry the extra output to the nearest power-station. A plane will crash, or, if you let your rail network get too complicated, a train might crash into another. All this action keeps you busy. Of course, the computer player will be building too... but that's okay. If you're making enough money, you can just buy his ass out.
All in all, TTD is one of the best games this jaded gamer has ever played. Years old now, it remains as fresh and original as it did in 1994.
