Customer Reviews

Monopoly (Jewel Case)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This version of Monopoly is really nice, in that they put lots of spit and polish into it. Very nice animations, video cutscenes, etc. And all the 'extras' can be individually turned off too, which is good because after 15 minutes of them repeating, it becomes tiresome. But it's a well done game.

Unfortunately, THIS GAME IS WRITTEN FOR WINDOWS >> 3.1 <<! It's VERY old software based on the ancient WinG graphics library for Win3.1. As such, it won't run on Win2K, and was shaky on 98,
and follows old Win3.1 install conventions, which puts files places they really shouldn't be.

Which would be fine if there was an update, but aren't any. So it's unplayable now (wont run on Win2000.) A shame. For it's day, this was a really sharp title.

Being a Monopoly fan myself did not help me in my quest for an unbiased review of this king of games! (Notice the bias already?).

And it is one of those things, I suppose: you either like Monopoly, or you don't. I do, and I think the PC version of this old timer has been a complete success!

First, one of the problems that any monopoly player normally has is that not many people are always willing to play with him/her at the drop of a hat. Well, this Monopoly gives you the choice of playing against AI players, or against other human peers around the world... almost at anytime!

Remember, there must be someone connected to the net, at any one time, playing monopoly somewhere in the world!

Second, the game allows you to play its normal rules, and now you can vary them to suit your wants and needs. That is a big plus, as previous primitive versions would force you to play only one set of rules. I believe this Monopoly deserves a second star for that only feature.

Third, playing monopoly on your PC becomes, with this Monopoly Version, a truly multimedia interactive experience. Now you can see the properties before you buy them. Everytime you land in a property, you see a video clip of the property you land on. You can deal and wheel with other players, you can outbid them in auctions (and they can be nasty to you too!), and you can crush them by financially beating them to submission! (and they don't throw the board on your face if you do!).

True, if you are a seasoned Monopoly fan, you would know what properties to buy by their respective colours. But having the video clip (this is an option you can switch off) is refreshing, and adds an extra dimension to the traditional game. Kids love it too. :-)

The playability of this Monopoly version is outstanding. It almost plays by itself. It frees you from having to be the bank or appointing someone in that position. It just lets you play, whilst your computer takes care of the Bank (and it does not steal from you or cheat... to the best of my knowledge!). :-)

Even if you're not a monopoly fan (yet), you should give it a try. Play it, and you may be converted... but be very careful: It can be extremely addictive. Have fun!

I bought this game at my local office supply store and got a good price for it. The game I bought had a Monopoly watch included, too. It's worth the money, but there are a few flaws. You can customize the board, but if you save the game to play another time, the board reverts to the "Classic" board (with Baltic, Oriental, etc). The street names are mixed up on a few of the City boards; the two most expensive properties on the board will be (for example) "A" and "B" on the board, but the title deeds will be "B" and "A". Also, with the City boards, the Chance cards don't change. For example on the Washington D.C. board, the card "Advance token to Boardwalk" doesn't change to "Advance token to the Capitol." When you land on the Chance square on the fourth side of the board and draw the Go Back 3 Spaces card and move back to Community Chest, a Community Chest card isn't drawn. The token's comments are repetitive and annoying, and I've found it more fun to turn off the sound on my computer. BUT, this is a great value. If you stick to the classic board or can work around the annoyances with the street names on the City Boards, you'll have a lot of fun. The camera angles are cool. The ability to set your own rules (about Free Parking, number of houses, etc), make it easier to customize each game so that it's like your own house rules. I made custom boards with the street names in my town and with the names of various cities in the area. That was fun. Buy the game. Enjoy yourself. And get ready for some marathon games against the computer, just like in real life!

I will say up front that I only play this game on our old computer (that still runs on Windows 95). So, I have no idea whether the guy below is right about this being unsupported on Windows 2000.

I will say this:

This computer game (like the board version) has great replay value. There is nothing like whipping five computer players and setting new personal records for money won (what more could the fallen, self-centered part of our humanity desire?).

This computer game also has some glitches. There are whole games where it seems impossible to land on any property that you can buy (once the computer owns it though--landing on it is a different matter; then the floodgates of impending poverty break forth).

The game's music is fine for a game this old. Having the different songs available adds nice variety--and in one case--some salsapoly flavor.

The host though--MAN!--his stuff, which starts out all funny, gets old mighty darn fast. You're gonna need him for auctions though, so just shutting him off can be problematic.

Overall, I have written this review to praise a game that has become an old standby. It has some flaws, most of which are somewhat entertaining. So...if you can still get this game and find a system to play it on, I give it my full recommendation.

It's not too bad when you play the game but you have to admit - the cover's sort of cheesy. It's nice because you can create your own board and choose pictures for it but I made a board and then next time I went on and tried using it but it wouldn't work. The basic idea is worth 5 stars but making it work made me lower by 2 stars. And now whenever I try using it won't work. So Windows ME users - PLEASE DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME.

This review applies to the current version of the game, which is lightyears beyond the previous Hasbro version or any other. The board moves like the DOOM world, the tokens gleam and talk.

The game IS customizable, from the renaming of properties (either one of over a half dozen real worlds or make up your own, i.e. replace Marvin Gardens with "My Sister's Stinky Feet") to controlling prices for whammy squares. It doesn't have enough options, though. You can't disengage the auctioning of properties, nor can you set the game to stop at a given time. Also, the Community Chest and Chance decks don't have extra cards like computer SORRY does, and you're limited to the standard MONOPOLY tokens -- they don't give you a cat, a phone, or a sailboat alongside the familiar shoe, hat and dog.

Lots of luck expecting those things in a new version, though -- Hasbro sold its computer games to another company, and I doubt they'll upgrade any of them.

Nevertheless, the current MONOPOLY passes go -- er, muster.

Monopoly is definitely one of the most fun games out there. But a large part of that fun is playing it with other people. Against the computer, or yourself, it's kind of boring. This game has lots of bells and whistles like little movies for each space, animated tokens, and sound effects, but eventually these are just annoying, and eventually I just turned most of them off. This version has all the same spaces and tokens as the board game, but for some reason it's just not as fun.

I've had a lot of fun playing Monopoly on my brand new PC with this product, which I purchased from an online auction service since it's an old product no longer manufactured.

I have few complaints. I'm running it on Windows XP (Media Center Edition), and, as old as it is, it works without a hitch. Some have complained it won't run on Windows 2000 and that's no surprise -- a lot of programs that ran on earlier editions of Windows won't run on Windows 2000, which is one reason Windows 2000 wasn't out there all that long before XP premiered.

Another complaint, that when you set up the game with all the rules and features you want, you have to do it every time you play the game isn't correct. There's very definitely a menu choice to save the features set-up as you've chosen, so that each time you fire up the game, it will play the way you've chosen.

As to the computer cheating, well, there are two set-up menu choices, one to allow the computer to cheat, and one to allow players to cheat. I didn't choose either of those options and the computer doesn't cheat, and it won't let me cheat. So I can't understand those who complain about the computer's cheating ways -- if you don't want it to cheat, don't pick that option.

Here are my only complaints. The game board display takes up less than 1/4 of my screen in the upper left hand corner, leaving a huge amount of blank space. I'd like the game board to fill most of my screen so it's easier to see. The displays to the left that show which properties are owned by whom, and how much money each player has, should also be larger. With the game board's small size, it's hard to see where the individual tokens are sometimes.

My other complaint is the amount of time it takes for all the various .wav files and animation to play each time a token lands on a space. I've turned many of those off because it slows the game down to a crawl. With some experimentation, I've found that some are essential because they convey the status of each piece of property and show who's getting money when rent is due. But other animations are simply a waste of time and try my patience. And some of the .wav files are just annoying to hear again and again.

Speaking of .wav files, there's a short, concise sound associated with each token. It's useful to hear the sound played when it's time for a particular token to roll the dice, and the same sound is played when a token is awarded money -- by passing go, by collecting rent when another token lands on property the first token owns, by drawing a Community Chest or Chance card that awards money, etc. But some of the sounds are really irritating when you've heard them a hundred times during the game. The cannon, for example, has a gunpowder explosion sound. The battleship has the loud, deep honking sound of a ship's klaxon. I don't use those two tokens anymore when playing against the computer.

The iron has a steam hissing sound (not too bad) and the thimble has the single "kling" of a small bell. The shoe has a skipping, scampering sound. Those aren't bad. The scottie dog's "arf, arf," however gets old fast.

One of the fun things is being able to pick optional game rules that are popular among Monopoly players, but not official according to Parker Brothers. For example, I've chosen the option where you get double the $200 salary if you land on "Go" instead of just passing it. I've also chosen the option where fines and assessments paid go into a fund whose current balance gets paid out to any token landing on "Free Parking." I've also turned off the option that any unowned property not purchased by the token who lands on it gets put up for auction. The auction process is actually quite annoying to me -- it takes too much time.

There are some things that are useful when you get used to them. If you land on an unowned railroad, you'll hear the train bell clanging with the train sitting in the station. If owned, the train moves away from the station while blowing its horn a couple of times. If mortgaged, there is no train and the station is in deteriorating condition.

For "street" properties, the animations are amusing. The cheapest properties show up as the city dump and the most expensive are like fancy estates, with various depictions in between as values increase. Each has a fence and a gate. If unowned, the gate's open and there's a "for sale" sign posted." If owned, the gate is closed. If mortgaged, there's a chain and a padlock on the gate.

Another option worth choosing is to "gray out" mortgaged properties as well as unowned properties. You can tell the difference immediately because mortgaged properties have a small "deed" icon on them with the black-and-white side up. But having them grayed out tells you the status and you can see at a glance which ones are still up for sale, which are owned, and which are mortgage.

You can also look at the status table to the left of the board and see who owns what. It takes a bit of getting used to, but there is a system where you can tell who owns any piece of property quite readily once you've learned it -- it's not hard.

In the end, it's exactly like playing Monopoly with the original American game board, according to the rules you like, and it's quite a bit of fun.

One tip: buy every piece of property you can, and the moment you get control of an entire color group, get hotels on it as fast as you can afford to buy them. The one who gets control of a couple of color groups and gets them built up will win the game, and if you do that, you can actually beat the computer a lot of the time. The computer is programmed to do just that, so it might beat you, too.

All in all, it's a great game simulation, but they should have provided a "zoom" option to enlarge the display, and they should have come up with some less annoying sounds to represent certain of the tokens.

Hasbro has come out with several versions
of Monopoly for the PC. This version created
by Westwood Studios is the best. It is a true
Windows applications (instead of DOS/Active-X)
with Menu bar, buttons, and dialog boxes. It
works great on a "non-state of the art" PC.
This version holds closely to the original
monopoly game while including multimedia graphics
and sound. While you have to be a little
technically saivy, I have played over the
Internet with other people many times.

This game is very true to the original monopoly with all the same spaces, official rules and chance cards. If you want a budget version of the game this is a good choice. Two things I did like was the fact that you can write your own AI scripts for opposing players and that the optional rules that many people use at home are included. You can play with the free parking bonus and make the game a little more or less challenging. I didn't like how repetetive the game was as far as graphics and sounds. Delightful when you first install it but annoying as time goes on. I think as a budget title it gives you good value but monopoly fans may want to spend a few extra bucks to get a newer version with more bells and whistles.