There have been a lot of great Amiga games, and a we have lot of threads about great memories of those.
How about a thread that captures the best laugh you've had playing a game? That possibly unexpected moment of pure hilarity that inspires running jokes that may have survived the 15 or 20 years now since they happened. There anything you fire up once in a while that still brings side-paining laughter fits to everyone in the room?
For me, one of the classics has to be Big Business. On the surface, it tries to be a fairly straight-forward manufacturing business management game. You have budgets to balance, resource inventories to manage, manufacturing plants to build and set productions on, etc. In MULE fashion, there are resource auctions every round, and other standard game mechanics.
Now, the game is intentionally lighthearted. There are plenty of Easter Eggs to find by clicking around on the screen. (For example, you can shoot the test rat in the R&D lab, and occasionally you'll even get sued for it.) You can also plot some industrial espionage against your fellow players. If your company is succeeding, the board room graphics get updated, if your company is failing, the marketing director starts showing up drunk, etc. And for the first few rounds everything stays pretty much on the tracks.
But then the insanity and true hilarity starts creeping in. A minor purchase transaction may send the boardroom from champagne glasses to empty beer cans. That small loan stacked up into billions of dollars, overnight. Some bidding in the auctions goes haywire -- someone paid you to take their inventory! Of course your workers went on strike, but that actually turned out to be good fortune, as one of the raw materials you were paid to take last turn is now worth more than you were hoping to sell the finished goods for. Among the chaos the headlines start getting more bizarre, players start getting multi-billion dollar loans without even applying for them, and someone just got sued for $4, but had to pay millions in court fees. And finally one of the companies gets bailed out to the tune of a few trillion dollars, just before the game culminates with a Guru Meditation.
A truer picture of the complexities of economy may never be painted again. We tried a drinking game over this game once, but no one has enough memory of it to reassemble the rules. :lol:
