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8.4 ultra recommended
One of my favorite TV shows is BBC One morning hit Homes Under the Hammer. Unless you've been living televisionless in a corn field, it's probably one of your favorites, too. The "hammer" of course refers to the auctioneer's hammer, as all the properties featured on the program are sold at auction. What a fascinating show. I especially like the remix of "Express Yourself" that plays when the estate agents give a final valuation of the refurbished property. Anyway, with such a deep interest in real estate, as you can imagine I was very excited to try this new offering from Big Fish Games, a time management game that's all about restoring old movie theatres. (It doesn't hurt that I love movies, too!)
Welcome to Movieville, USA. Megaplex Madness: Now Playing, from Gold Sun Games, puts you in the enviable position of owner of the failed Bowmont Theater. Left decrepit and abandoned since 1965's showing of Eleven Days in the Heartland, the theatre is in a bad way. The plaster is cracked in a handful of places, a nasty and dangerous-looking rat hole sits in the middle of the lobby, the foundation is split, spiderwebs criss-cross the balcony, and the red velvet rope and stanchions have been knocked over! No, you didn't buy it at an auction, but instead it was a late night impulse buy in front of the TV. I honestly tried not to buy it, but the game kept popping up dialogue box after dialogue box and wouldn't take no for an answer.
Luckily, purchase of the Bowmont Theater includes a few old geezers to sell tickets, popcorn, and act as ushers. (The original employess? Bums? It's unclear.) Never mind the dangerous ankle-snapping rat hole in the lobby floor... open the place to the public and if you can make enough money on ticket sales, you just might be able to restore the Bowmont to its original glory!
Gameplay involves dragging helpless customers to and from stations in the theatre lobby. Here's how it works: A customer walks into the theatre. Floating above their heads, a word balloon containing an icon reveals what they want to do. An icon of a movie ticket means the customer wishes to buy a ticket, for example. Using the mouse, you click on them and drag them to the ticket booth. A movie projector icon means they're ready to enter the auditorium, and should be dragged to its doors. A popcorn icon means they want to buy some popcorn, a joystick icon means they want to play an arcade game, a restroom icon means they need to use the facilities, etc.
Customers are fairly unremarkable Poser people, however their bodies amusingly act like ragdolls when you swing them around with the mouse. I tried to jam one of them down into the rat hole (I thought maybe I'd get a bonus or a free token), but unfortunately nothing happened.
When a customer arrives at a station, such as the ticket booth, their word balloon changes to an animated radial dial indicating how long before their action - in this case purchasing a movie ticket - is complete. The game quickly becomes an exercise in moving the correct customer to the correct spot in the theatre lobby and planning in advance to eliminate bottlenecks. Remember, these movie patrons are completely helpless and if one of them just bought some popcorn and is waiting to move to the auditorium entrance, she'll remain there blocking the popcorn concession stand for other customers until you move her to where she wants to go. It's not possible to force her to be polite and step aside so that other patrons can get their popcorn!
As in most time management games, customers get exasperated if kept waiting for too long, and eventually leave. You can gauge their level of satisfaction by looking at the number of tiny hearts above their heads. When all their hearts are gone, they turn and try to leave the theatre. Grab them! It's your last chance to convince them to stay and watch a movie and earn you that little bit extra toward reparing the movie theatre. Sometimes customers want something you don't serve in your theatre (maybe they want to buy pizza, but you don't sell pizza). Grab them! Shake them until they come to their senses.
(What's a heart worth these days? Exactly $1. Each time you drag a customer to a new place in the lobby, you'll get $1 for each heart floating above their heads.)
Once the movie starts, customers still in the lobby begin getting frantic. No one wants to miss those thirty minutes of trailers and previews and coffee commercials. (Seriously, have you been to a movie recently? It's crazy.) Customers lose hearts much more quickly when they're late to a film, but luckily you can click frantically on their word balloon radial dial to speed up their purchase. Or quicken the time it takes the usher to check their ticket. (And I must say, these ushers are the slowest I have seen anywhere, ever.) Or quicken the time it takes a customer to use the bathroom. (Probably not healthy to force yourself to hurry when using the bathroom but I'm not a doctor so don't quote me on that.)
Every level has a target goal you must reach. Do a little better than the target and you'll make "expert" status and win a free arcade token. And if you do really well, you'll receive "master" status and get a repair token that can fix up part of the theatre. The first thing I fixed in the Bowmont Theater was that rat hole. And it doesn't end with the Bowmont... there are four other theatres to restore, too.
Like Airport Mania, one of the best time management games, you can get bonus points for color-coordinating customers. You see, as in real life, or Dinertown, people in Movieville tend to wear matching outfits of the same color. Each time you serve a successive customer of the same color at a station, you get a plus added to that station's color bonus modifier that is in turn added to the dollar amount any customer (of that color) landing on that station will spend. Confused? Why do all the customers outfitted in blue like using the same entrance to the auditorium? Who cares? It's fun trying to match them and get bonus points. Once you reach a modifier of +5, you get an extra arcade token, too.
Arcade tokens are used in the Movieville arcade. There are five unlockable classic arcade minigames. These allow you to earn extra money for theatre upgrades. Like another popcorn station, a gumball machine, or enough cash to convince one of your old geezer employees to bring in one of his old geezer friends to man another empty station.
Here's a few hints to keep your megaplex from degenerating into madness: Always try for color bonuses whenever possible. However don't let a customer lose too many hearts waiting for the right colored station. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and send a red-skirted girl into a +5 green pizza concession station, even though that will remove those 5 bonus points. Buy extra stations first, even if you can't afford an employee to man them yet. They pay for themselves with color bonuses. When you're dragging a customer with the mouse, they won't lose hearts, so you should always be holding someone if you're waiting... and you don't even have to drag them back to wherever they came from. Just let go of the mouse button wherever you like and they'll fly back. (Carried by ghosts?) Get in the habit of always letting customers at the arcade game win by manipulating the joystick for them as soon as you drop them in front of the machine. Finally, if customers start asking for something you don't have, that's a clue to buy that item as soon as you can afford it. (Use arcade tokens and play minigames for extra cash if necessary.) Because after having their ideas shaken out of them, customers have to think for a while to decide what they want next, and that can waste valuable time and create a traffic jam of unsatisfied movie patrons!
Unfortunately, Megaplex Madness is a low resolution game. It's 800x600, which means a lot of detail is lost and the game definitely doesn't look as good as recent casual games - especially if you're using a modern PC. Come on, Gold Sun Games, at least use 1024x768. And the Poser people aren't as cute as hand drawn characters would be. That said, there are a lot of nice graphical touches, like the ragdoll behavior of customers being dragged back and forth and the animated popcorn in the main menus. The music isn't bad, but isn't remarkable either - with the exception of the theme that plays as a movie starts, and the separate fanfairs for winning and losing a level. Besides the low graphical detail, the only complaint I have with the game is that sometimes it's hard to grab walking customers. I swear a few times I clicked on them but the game didn't register that I got them.
Despite these minor quibbles, Megaplex Madness is actually quite fun. I'm not saying that the production values are bad, because they're not, but this game is definitely a good example of fun gameplay mechanics trumping graphics and sound. In that way it brings back fond memories of one of my favorite Jamaican horror movies, Popcorn, starring Tom Villard and Ray Walston.
Download Megaplex Madness: Now Playing