Hands-On Review: YOOT ToweR

Sega. Price: $49.99 list

December 28, 1998

Brought to you by Macs Only! Copyright 1998 by Bill Fox

"Welcome to YOOT ToweR" proclaims the opening page of the instruction manual. Actually, you have to build a tower because YOOT ToweR is a simulation game, a thinking game, not a first person shooter of evil beings. Sega provided a prerelease copy for this review. It is Mac only with a Windows version due early next year.

Specifications: The minimum requirements are Mac OS 7.5 or higher, a PowerMac, a CD ROM drive of 2X or faster, 100 MB of hard drive space, 32 MB of RAM and a monitor/graphics capability of 640x480 resolution with 256 colors. In other words, the requirements are pretty minimal.

Installation and Use

Just click on the installer on the YOOT ToweR CD disc. The installation is fairly typical and needs no further description.

In YOOT ToweR, you are the Owner and Chief Executive Officer in charge of building, managing and maintaining a tower. Your first job is to choose a location to build upon. Right now there is a choice of one of three locations: Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, Kegon Falls and downtown Tokyo. But YOOT ToweR is designed so that other location modules can be added at a future date. The "Selection Map" control panel lists the amount of funds that you have secured to begin construction of your tower, the maximum size of the tower in stories above and below ground and the maximum width that your tower can occupy on its building site. These parameters change for each location, for example Waikiki can have 45 stories above ground and Tokyo can have 100.

After selecting your building site, it opens in a window shown below at right and you begin constructing your tower using the many tools available on the floating "Tool" palette. General information, including the date and time, funds remaining, population and star rating, and occasional specific information on your tower is transmitted in the top floating window. The buttons on the Control palette at lower left provide specific information on the hotel portion of your tower, outside elements like billboards, pricing of the rooms, and an evaluation of the components of the tower and traffic to them.

Your tower is not just a hotel. It can have different levels of restaurants/cafes, different specialty shops and work spaces. Your tower can have attractions with a ticket booth and it can even have condominiums as many resort hotels seem to have. The screenshot below at left is the interior of the sample Tokyo tower included with YOOT ToweR. So far, the sample Tokyo tower has a three-story lobby with sculpture, seven additional floors, an elevator, an ice cream parlor on the fourth floor, several offices/businesses on the fifth through seventh floors and an apartment on top floor at the right end. The detail is actually very good The low resolution screenshot doesn't do it justice but it gives you the general idea. Diurnal time is simulated so there are night as well as day aspects to the tower. The four seasons are also simulated and the speed of time-related changes can be controlled.

You make money off the rent from occupied space and from occasional windfalls such as finding buried treasure when building underground floors. People occupy the available space depending on its attractiveness, accessibility and cost, each of which you control in various ways. Your mettle as a manager is tested with a variety of "Events" like VIP visits (potentially leading to increased star ratings), fires, terrorist attacks, power outages, diseases and annoyances like undesirable occupants and unruly pets. People move in or out, affecting your income, depending on how well you handle these events.

How do you decide which businesses to keep? You can check on the profitability of each. How do you know if your occupants are happy and will remain in your tower? There is a microphone tool that can be used to listen to the comments of each occupant.

The goal of YOOT ToweR is to completely construct the tower so the "Final Item" can be placed at the top, attain a five star rating and maintain the tower in a profitable state, meaning lots of tenants with low stress. However, there are an almost infinite number of combinations of tower elements so while some will be better that others, there is no one solution to attain.

Conclusions

As stated in the opening paragraphs, YOOT ToweR is a thinking, strategy game in the vein of SimCity and SimTower. There are construction rules that one needs to learn so it pays to read the manual carefully, especially if one is new to construction simulation games. For the uninitiated, the learning curve is modest. One doesn't simply install YOOT ToweR and begin to construct a tower although there are useful hint balloons that arise when violating the construction rules. I think it would be helpful to have a quick start section in the manual that maps to the enclosed sample tower. There is one major mistake in the manual that delayed my playing the game for this review. On p.7 and p.8 the manual states that 100 MB of memory is needed. While on travel I believed it and did not try the game but it is not true. Only 24 MB is needed for the game itself and the box states the requirements are for a system with 32 MB of RAM but I did not have the box with me. However, about 98 MB of hard drive space is needed to install YOOT ToweR. I am sure that this transposition of requirements will be fixed by Sega.

The graphics are nice and the detail of the tower components is good. However, the graphics are 2D flat and unremarkable for today's game market with 3Dfx Voodoo2 acceleration. Furthermore, YOOT ToweR uses only 256 colors. Clearly this is a tradeoff to reach as broad a market as possible. YOOT ToweR doesn't really need the fancier graphics because, after all, it is a brain game. In playing it, you learn to master the interactions of things that need mastering to be a successful operations manager.

If you like cerebral challenges and simulation games, YOOT ToweR will appeal to you as it has to me.

. . [Macs Only!]