Casino Inc.

by Konami

Product Features

• Hit the jackpot with Casino Inc.

Product Details

• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00008JOMO
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 7.2 x 1 inches ; 4.8 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: March 25, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,645 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Welcome to your new job. Welcome to the the real deal. Welcome to the City of Sin. If you love Sim games, Tycoon games, Theme games or the movie Casino, you'll enjoy your stay. All we ask is that you make our casinos attractive, and other people's less attractive. Anyway you can. We begin in the 1970s. It's seedy. It's glitzy. It's all yours. Take a gamble.

Start small with a slot machine or two. Employ some staff and open the doors. Pretty soon people will be talking about your place from Coast to Coast.

Visitor profiles vary from wealthy businessmen, professional gamblers to trailer trash and holiday flutterers. All have tastes to suit their budget and style. Teenagers seek noisy arcade machines, and high rollers want big stakes and big returns. They all have one thing in common: cash to spend. There is one simple rule. The longer they play, the more they pay.

As you grow to own hotels and casinos you'll want to set the amount of floor space given to rooms, bar and restaurant areas, roulette, card tables, slot machines, entertainment lounges, and to also set the level of payouts, profits and cream offs on the tables and machines. Take too much, and people won't come. Be too generous and your place will be crammed with cheap-shot gamblers (although you can charge 'em a fortune for beer & food).

You will be able to see, in high detail, which of your outfits are popular. The graphical scale allows you to track the ebb and flow of the city at a zoomed out perspective, but then to zoom inside your buildings to see the gamblers playing Black Jack at the tables.

You can actively encourage the growth of the city by your actions. This is a tourist town; it has a multitude of businesses that very visibly attract customers if popular; the airport and roads become busy. The streets get choked. The tills ring more frequently. And, provided you're taking care of business, the profits will roll in.

But you probably don't want to share these profits with the competition. And this is where your ability to spike the competition comes in. Make sure that other casinos have a rough ride by using your Cheats, Troublemakers and Hitmen successfully.

Gain market share by eliminating your opponents and making your casinos bigger, better and more profitable.

Product Description

Platform:  WINDOWS 98/ME/2000/XP Publisher:  KONAMI Packaging:  RETAIL BOX Rating:  MATURE Hit the jackpot with Casino Inc. the complete sim that drops you right in the glitzy and sometimes gritty world of casino management. Casino Inc features all the detail expected from a simulation. But combined with the appeal of Casino life and the added spice of the "adult" side of the business Casino Inc. has more to offer than any other casino management game.Features Hire and utilize the likes of Hookers and Hit MenPlay the game inside your casinos and outside in the surrounding cityBuild and run up to 8 casinos within the city limits at the same timeLearn the spending habits and primal urges of over 120 charactersSystem Requirements Windows 98/2000/XPPentium III 450 processor (600 recommended)64 MB RAM (128 recommended)16 MB 3D video card (32 recommended)4x CD-ROM drive

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun & Feature Filled But Sometimes Clumsy, November 20, 2003

By 

aralissia "~aralissia" (North Norway) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Casino Inc. (CD-ROM)

Casino Inc is a sim/tycoon/micromangement game where, as you guessed, you get to make and control casinos. There are other games that have been down this road before; specifically Casino Mogul comes to mind. Casino Inc is set up in a "the Sims" type environment, with lots of attractions, gambling tables, employees etc to set up. Dance stages, bowling alleys, restaurants, cooks, floormen, cheats, troublemakers, and dance floors just to name some. A few more personalized touches, such as wallpaper, carpeting, paintings etc. would have been nice as often times the casinos you own just seem to blend into each other.
There is also a map screen that allows you to move around the city, go inside other businesses etc. A similar map is used to see what advertisements are available and buildings for sale. Your staff screen is simple enough, but you seem to spend way too much time there as someone is always clamouring to get more. Of course this depends on factors such as atmosphere, if the police are called, fires, murders etc. If you try to fire someone instead of giving them a raise, be prepared for the rest of the staff to get a bit unhappy (depending on how many staff the employee interacted with). I found these additions realistic, but others might find them irritating. I also wish it would say which staff are in which casino on which floor. It's a bit confusing finding them sometimes. This depicts a problem that seems to plague other aspects of Casino Inc - the sometimes clumsy interface. The learning curve is a bit harder than most tycoons, but that's partially due to the fact that there's so much to do. I personally prefer games where I often have something to micromanage, while I've read reviews that criticize this extremely. They wanted to be able to sit back and watch the casino make money. Well if you manage it well enough, eventually you do have some breaks. I normally speeded up the game then to get something else to do ;)
There are 3 scenarios - very very long ones. While it is true there is no sandbox mode in the game, if you go to their website and DOWNLOAD THE PATCH it adds, amongst other things, a sandbox mode once you've completed all the scenarios.
The graphics are cheerful enough, although a little more differentiation might have been nice. At least the visitors come in a wide variety of shapes, types, sizes, colors, and sexes. Whenever a convention happens, you get to see some funny costumes as well ;) (Sci fi, fetish)
The sound ... well don't have much to say about it. The voices got irritating early on so I turned it way down. The music is ok enough, but not good enough that I didn't start winamp after awhile of playing.
Overall Casino Inc has been criticized for having a clumsy interface and for demanding much more micromanagement than the available menus and submenus can make manageable. I say it depends on what you like. I personally found this game very enjoyable, as I like games like Restaurant Empire, The Sims, Ghost Master, and Rock Manager. I praise micromanagement and beg for more. If you're the same, you will probably dig this game as well.

GRAPHICS: 8 - nothing fancy, but cute enough
SOUND: 5 - nothing special
GAMEPLAY: 7 - not for your casual tycoon player. Takes a bit of time to learn. But if you like a lot of micromanagement it can be quite fun. There should have been a bit more of finesse in the menu system though.
PLAY VALUE: 7 - the scenarios are very long, and if you install the patch you will get a sandbox mode at the end. But the little flaws might get repetitive and irritating after awhile.
FUN: 8 - lot's of cute features, and I felt pretty good playing it
OVERALL: 7 - 3.5 star on Amazon scale, but Im gonna give this game a tilt and push it up to 4 stars, since I find it worthy of that.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Endless fun., October 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Casino Inc. (CD-ROM)

I picked this one up on a whim, and I sure am glad I did. If you like sim/Sim games and management games like Theme Park, then this one will keep you up playing for weeks on end.

The game tracks hundreds or thousands of characters as they move through an explorable city, wanting various things and finding ways to fulfill those wants. Your job, as an owner of multiple food, entertainment, lodging, and gaming venues, is to meet those needs -- to make sure their cash comes to *you* and no one else.

You begin with some cash and an empty building. Place a modest few gaming tables around the floor -- blackjack, poker, slots. Add some food service items, entertainment items, and amenities/decorations, and hire some people you like to staff the kiosks, deal the cards, watch for cheats, sweep the floors, "escort" your clients, etc. If you can, pick up some advertising; choose your locations carefully. When you have some more cash, you can expand to new floors and buildings and set up limo service and shuttle routes to make sure people come to you *first*.

The game offers three levels of play, structured as cities of increasing complexity. As the game progresses, play becomes a little nastier -- you can hire some of the cheats your floormen find by having bouncers take them downstairs and beat the tar out of them. You'll need your cheats, as well as troublemakers and even hitmen, to sabotage your opponents and drive them toward bankruptcy, thus sending their customers your way and increasing your market share. (Beware, though, as they'll be doing the same to you.) If you can sink them, you can bid on their land and possibly rebuild.

As you meet your goals, the game offers you new attractions -- fuller dining facilities, new tables, sports betting, stages, bowling alleys, movie theaters, even a wedding chapel. (You can micromanage all these attractions however you choose to turn the best profit, but they come with defaults just in case you don't care.) You can build general-interest casinos, to attract all comers, or you can tweak your layout and configurations for any of the game's many categories of visitors -- socialites, vacationers, teens, seniors, trailer trash, fetishists, high rollers of various kinds, Elvis impersonators, etc. Give them what they want, and they'll keep gambling; the more they gamble, the more you win.

The game also crunches your numbers in multiple ways -- by visitor type, by market share in several categories, by profit and occupancy per attraction per day, and on and on -- so, if you want to, you can figure out exactly how to maximize your profits. If not, you can just make a pretty casino and watch all the people move around, drink, complain, fall in love, and (hopefully) gamble. If you're feeling criminal, you can "ride" your troublemakers and hitmen, telling them where to make trouble and deciding whether they spike drinks, deck some old guy on the disco floor, gang up to shoot the grinning hostess, or whatever. (If you can fire off a few shots in an opponent's place, the police will close him down for a while and probably fine him. Great way to cripple his bankroll!)

The graphics are cartoonish in a good way, and the little people say and do funny things, like bored Sims. I'd like to see the game expand its possibilities a little (more colors and textures, more decorative options, more casino themes) and streamline a few of its features (the popup windows, object placement, crowd flow, some kinds of character movement). It also seems unsure sometimes of whether it's British or American. But its flaws are *very* minor and don't impede game play at all. It also has a built-in cheat system that allows for a sandbox mode -- much, much fun.

Some will play this a bit, tire of it, and move on to something else. (You know who you are.) But those of us who love the details, and finding just the right way to make a thing work, will find this endlessly amusing and happily sacrifice our responsibilities to it. All told, twenty bucks very well spent.

Keep an eye out for the expansion pack (*The Management*?) that's due in late '03!

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome Game, July 6, 2003

By 

Edward Phillips - See all my reviews

This review is from: Casino Inc. (CD-ROM)

I wish i could give this game 10 stars. Its an awesome game thats not getting nearly as much attention it needs. YOu start out with an empty floor of a casino. Then you start to build up on money by building dance floors, movie theatres, stage shows, and gambling attractions. Then you gradually start to get hitmen, cheats, troublemakers. You can send them to other peoples casino to wreak havoc. If you like The Sims, Tycoons, or other games. Its an awesome game and you should all buy it.