Game Review - Aerobiz (SNES)

Sheesh! A unique game for once? Aerobiz is one of the most unique I've played, actually, and the only game without a clone I've played for the Super NES! Released by Koei in the early nineties, Aerobiz is some kind of business simulation game that revolves around the aviation industry.

There's no storyline in Aerobiz; it's just like SIM City or the SIMs. You make your own story up. You start off with virtually nothing, the head of a company that owns airliners and controls the various aspects involved with them. I can safely assess that having played this game I could probably run a real airline company-this game is that deep. You control everything from the routes used by the airplanes to the brands of the airplanes, to competitor research and development based on that research, to the mechanics behind your individual spec aircraft, to the individual facets of budget allocation... it's mind-boggling.

Onward to the more fun category: graphics! Unfortunately, however, the graphics in Aerobiz are sub-par. While they're decent in terms of quality, they lack any quantity; what you see at first is what you get the entire time. You basically spend the entire game at either a map menu or your overview menu, looking at figures and data or a little overview of what is supposed to be your air business's physical locations and routes. Quite boring.

If the graphics were bad, the audio is worse-Aerobiz lacks any semblance of a good sound scheme. The monotonous music in the background eventually becomes some annoying brain-mushing ear-deafening track that'll stick with you even after you're done (since you have to spend hours to actually make any progress with the game, the three-minute interval loop of a sound track will definitely stick with you for hours). It's terrible.

Finally, and most heavily, the topic of learning curve: Aerobiz is impossibly difficult to master. Even on the beginner level, the enemy AI, which you have to compete with in business, utterly crushes me. And while it doesn't take much to comprehend all of the metrics you have to master, actually mastering them is so difficult that I barely want to try continuing. Since this is a simulation game, you get virtually no reward for any given completion of a task... all you get are some figures on the screen, and the success of overcoming. If you're into that kind of thing, more power to you, but not I!

In closing, Aerobiz is an extraordinarily unique game (but is rather boring overall). While its uniqueness makes it a ton of fun, and the concept is quite neat, its execution isn't done as well as it could have been. I suppose the limitation of the SNES cartidge caused this to be more of a failure than it should've been, but in reality Koei could have taken it much further. All-in-all, Aerobiz gets a shaky three cost-benefit-analysis-documents out of five from me.