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You can expect everything to grind to a halt because a factory wasn't getting enough goods or because a warehouse was filled up with raw materials faster than a factory could process them. As if to keep you from getting bored, this happens fairly regularly in Industry Giant II, particularly as your business empire expands. Once everything is set up and running, there's not a lot to do until something goes wrong. When you add in the responsibility of setting up transportation routes for individual vehicles and their cargo, the whole process becomes even more difficult. You can change settings for factory utilization and worker productivity to manage the flow of goods, but there's no convenient way to know in advance how much or how little of each product you need. Because of this, the gameplay consists of working out the details of your elaborate industrial infrastructure while the game is paused. Matching supply and demand requires a lot of counting, clicking around and checking different buildings, and referring to reference screens. Managing your business is awkward at best. In Industry Giant II, a newspaper is just a stack of pages, and the process of creating it is no different from the process of making canned fruit, skateboards, or aluminum ladders. There are only the mechanics of manufacturing with none of the important nuances of publishing, such as circulation or advertising. Unfortunately, each of these industries is handled so abstractly that you might as well be dealing in "thingamajigs," "gewgaws," and "doodads." For instance, publishing a newspaper consists only of cutting down trees, processing the lumber at a sawmill, using the grain wood to make paper at a paper mill, and then making newspapers at a printing press before selling them at a bookstore. If you like business simulations, you'll probably find all this variety intriguing. New vehicles and products come along as time passes.

Also, the most profitable items you can produce with a printing press are board games, a popular industry in Germany, but a struggling niche market in the United States. Tennis shoes are sports shoes, harmonicas are mouth organs, wheelbarrows are pushcarts, action figures are action heroes, sleds are sledges, and, unfortunately for American sports fans, soccer balls are called footballs. Looking over the products, you may notice (if you didn't already realize) that Industry Giant II wasn't developed in the United States. The main appeal of Industry Giant II is the remarkable breadth of products: donuts, beer, purses, steel, hair dryers, comic books, lawn mowers, tissues, calendars, accordions, toothbrushes (regular or electric), plastic patio furniture, telephones, jeans, eggs, barbecue grills, inflatable boats, summer clothes, cotton, Christmas trees, lumber, and, of course, garden gnomes.

As time passes (the game includes 80 years of industrial technology, from 1900 to 1980), new goods and industries are invented, expanding your options. In some scenarios, you'll have to compete against other businesses that will cut into your market share by selling the same goods you are. Random weather and economic events can shake things up from time to time. As you accumulate luxury points, which also serve as a means of keeping score in some scenarios, you can buy increasingly lavish homes to place on the map. The sequel adds a new feature: the accumulation of luxury points based on how well you're doing.

You can even spend your money building structures that encourage faster city growth. You also have to build and manage the train routes that carry the goods around and the warehouses where they're stored.Īs you meet the demand for different goods in a city, the city grows and demand increases. Instead, you have to mine bauxite and ore, raise cattle for your leather seats, and use petroleum to make rubber for your tires, among other things. For instance, if you want to sell cars, it's not enough to simply build an automobile factory and a car dealership. You even set up and manage transportation between each of the steps along the way. In Industry Giant II, you make money by stringing together the elements of a long process that stretches from harvesting raw materials all the way to selling finished goods from a retail outlet. A mouse click brings up floating information screens. In fact, Industry Giant II may be a bit too broad for its own good. Now its sequel has landed on North American shores, courtesy of its developer-turned-publisher JoWood, and the sequel has even more grandeur, breadth, and business, though not in equal measure.

1997's Industry Giant was a grand, sprawling business game brought over from Austria by the now defunct Interactive Magic.