While trying to reach your goals, your primary source of information will be
your hotel guests. You can select any guest at your hotel and get a list
of complaints that they have about your hotel, as well as a measure of their
overall satisfaction with your hotel. These complaints are usually
something along the lines of "I wish there was a vending machine in the lobby"
or "I wish there was a wardrobe in my room." To please these customers,
add a vending machine to the lobby and a wardrobe to the guest rooms.
That's it. Check on the guests after adding the object and their complaint
will be gone, as if the aura of a vending machine in the lobby three floors
below has put your guest's karma at peace.
Aside from their role as psychic robotic complaint generators, there's not
much of a reason to watch your guests or follow them around. They are devoid of
personality and never really do anything all that interesting. Your hotel
will feel more like a drone factory than The Sims: Hotel. It seems
that the game randomly generates the name, sex, and age of the guests, but aside
from that they are pretty much the same. In fact, the game doesn't even
seem to pay attention to the characteristics it has generated for the guests.
In one game, I had a 15 year old guest complain that the business center needed
projectors and more comfortable chairs. What was he doing down there
instead of hanging out at the pool or the arcade? And where did he come up
with the money to rent a meeting room for the day?
The business side of the game seems to be sound in the fact that if you
listen to your customers' needs your business will improve, but it doesn't
provide the degree of control usually found in business sims. For example,
you can specify the salary and training budgets for your staff, but you can't
set the size of the staff or fire underperformers. The tools are your
disposal include marketing campaigns, room and package rates, and market
research. However, your income statement only shows aggregate information,
so it will be hard for you to tell exactly what's working and how it is
contributing to your bottom line. The business side of things too often
degenerates into tweaking the room rates and adding objects as your guests
complain that something is missing.
The game is devoid of any kind of special or interesting situations that
would go a long way towards keeping your interest. Hotel price wars,
seasonal travel, conventions, and fires are just a few of the things that I think
would be part of any hotel sim, but apparently they did not occur to the game's
designers. Too bad, such things would have gone a long way to adding spice
to what in the end is a fairly bland game.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
55%. If you really enjoy interior decorating or have always wanted to design
a hotel, you might enjoy Hotel Giant. Otherwise, the disappointing
business simulation and the drone-like guests make it difficult for the game to hold your
interest for too long.
System Requirements: 350 MHz Pentium II CPU; 64 MB RAM; 16 MB
Video RAM; 4x CD-ROM; 900 MB Hard Drive Space; Mouse.
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