I am not the kind of person who has the patience to play through a resource management game. I remembered when I first played Rollercoaster Tycoon - it only lasted me 15 minutes before I decided to call it quits and I never played the game again.
When I got my hands on Now Boarding, a resource management game based on the Adobe Air platform, I didn’t have much interest initially and put aside only 15 minutes just to test it out. In the end, I spent the whole afternoon playing it. It completely blew my mind.
Now Boarding is a well designed tycoon-style game by Gabob. It is a 2D flash-based game with a simple cartoon-like interface. The storyline is simple: Airway Airlines is facing some serious management problems and their airport is going to be closed if they don’t get some help. You are being employed to take charge of the daily operation of the airport and to keep the airlines business alive.
Starting with two 737 4-seater airplanes, your task is to ferry your passengers to where they want to go and make them happy in the process. Every passenger is tagged with an alphabet associated with the city that they want to go to. What you need to do is to load them to the planes and send the flights to the respective destination cities. As more and more passengers appear in the boarding lounge, each wanting to go to different places, you will have to make swift decisions on which passengers go on which planes and plan the flight routes effectively to avoid dropping the passengers at the wrong destinations.
As of all games, the initial stage is often very easy. With only three cities and a small number of passengers to manage, you will be able to rake in great profits and obtain excellent customer ratings easily in the early stage. As you expand to other cities and more and more passengers keep coming, things start to become complicated. You will have to decide if you want to send an empty plane to another city to pick up passengers or make the plane go on a detour when it is on its way back. At such moments, you can be thrown into a state of disorder easily and you need to make quick decisions and avoid any mistakes. In the process, you also have to keep your passengers entertained, otherwise they will rate you ‘F’ for your services. If you accumulate too many ‘F’’s, you will have to restart the month.
After every round (each round is equivalent to one month in the game), you will be able to manage the other aspects of your airport. You can upgrade the plane to a bigger one that can seat more passengers, promote/fire your employees according to their performance, increase the number of chairs in the waiting area and also decorate your terminal with plants, paintings and snack bars so as to keep your passengers happy.
If you are looking for a game that can keep you occupied for hours, or even days and one that is bundled with some challenges and difficulties, yet allows you to feel that you are in control of the game, then you have to try Now Boarding.
The game is free to download and you get to play the full episode 1 of the Career mode for free. Those who want more can upgrade to the full version at $16.99 in which you get to enjoy two other modes: Free Play and Survival. You can also play the original version at Gimme5Game for free.
Now Boarding requires Adobe Air to work. You can
- download the Adobe air for your platform here,
- download Now Boarding here,
- or play the game at Gimme5Game here.
After playing it, come back to the comments and let us know what you think of the game. How far did you get in the game? How many passengers did you annoy?! What was your rating?
(By) Damien Oh is an all-out technology geek who loves to tweak and hack various operating systems to make life easier. Check out his blog at MakeTechEasier.com where he shares all the tips, tricks and tutorials.
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Tags:adobe AIR, Games
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