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hurricanemaxi · Registred Joined: 17 Sep 2011 Posts: 48

"Mega Mall Story" puts you in charge of a tiny shopping mall and tasks you with growing it into a teeming center of commerce while investing in the development of the surrounding neighborhood. Its animation may make it look a little childish, but there's enough depth to it to get players of any age hooked. For some users, this game will prove dangerously addictive.

If the idea of an empire-building game in which you construct a shopping mall sounds familiar, that might be because Take Two Interactive published a series starting about a decade ago called "Mall Tycoon." It wasn't part of the Maxis/Electronic Arts Sim universe, but it had that general feel to it. It definitely felt Sim-ier than "SimRefinery" (this was a real game).

But while "Mega Mall Story" shares "Mall Tycoon's" basic concept, the iPhone game doesn't look much like a Sim game at all. It looks like a two-dimensional version of "Habbo Hotel." It's all bright colors and blocky animation and twee little cartoon character patrons that putter around all day, every day, as though shopping is a paying gig for them. The mall you build is a flat grid -- it only goes up and down, left and right, with no depth to it.

And that's exactly the kind of design that works just right on a phone. A game on a 3.5-inch screen doesn't necessarily need to have mind-popping graphics or advanced 3D rendering technology to be worth a few bucks. In fact, those things sometimes really end up getting in the way by making the game a little harder to control. Games like "Mega Mall Story" may look a little cutesy with their faux 8-bit graphics, but the progression of the game itself makes it downright addictive.

I was hooked in minutes, and for the last couple of hours much of my brain power has been devoted to meeting development goals for a shopping mall that doesn't exist.
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"Mega Mall Story" makes you the head honcho of a small and rather pathetic little shopping center in the middle of an underdeveloped neighborhood. This is a zero-star mall, and you're tasked with making it a five-star mall in 15 years. You have to not only grow the number of stores in your mall, but also expand the physical size of your property and invest in the growth of the surrounding neighborhood in order to build a customer base.

To earn each star, you'll need to meet sales goals, meet store-count goals, increase your base of loyal customers, and build status-symbol establishments like planetariums and medical clinics (not something you generally see in U.S. malls, but just go with it).

Of course, time is limited. Those 15 years will pass quickly. The mall opens and closes once each round, and each round represents a month on the calendar. As time passes, economic conditions swing back and forth, impacting sales. Weather conditions and holiday seasons will play for and against you, and if you survive long enough, you may even witness a competing mall come along -- and possibly later go belly-up.
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