Aerobiz

You cannot afford it. Peasant

On my way home from Ottawa I got to the airport 15 minutes before my flight. The deskworker said “You missed your flight, pay us $150 to rebook. Now I can do the math and realize that if I argued my way onto said plane it would take 15 minutes minus the time it takes to go through security and everything so I just forked the money over. When I found out that I would get to review Aerobiz I was ecstatic. Airports are ripe for some of the best kinds of exploitive piracy today. It’s this insane hermetic environment where suddenly everything costs like 3 times more and you can’t get a drink. Kind of like Dubai, I guess.

It seemed like it would be a game that could basically review itself. Run airports, make thousands of dollars, squash out all competition.

It was not to be so.

This game is part of the oddly named executive series. Either you play executives in all of them, or they were marketed for executives. I cannot think of one person who would come home after a hard day of running the cogs of industry to play a game about doing that same thing.

I should note really quickly that I suck at this game and that is definitely a part of my dislike for it. Also your advisory staff is patented and unmitigated balderdash. They tell you to negotiate routes to New York because tourism there will be so hot right now. I spend two quarters negotiating the routes and buying up DC-8s to fly them. I am ready for my assault on all competition. What happens? I can’t run a flight there. Bastard yanks jack up the price of running a flight there because tourism is going so well. Not cool Aerobiz, not cool.

It is one of the slowest games in existence. There are confirmation menus for everything and, if you’re really good, you’re treated to a little Mode-7 flyover of the route you’ve just created. It is a rigorous simulation of being asked shiftily if you’re sure by nervous staffers catering to your senile and deranged whims while you close your eyes and dream of Boeings flying the friendly pixellated skies for like 5 minutes.

Also it’s totally not a very rigorous simulation since I was Air Canada and the government didn’t prop my bloated carcass up when my business plan completely and utterly failed. I didn’t make it past 5 years.