What this is about.

How spooky is it to have to go back to your own strategy tips article to teach yourself how to play a game? When I pulled out my copy of Rails Across America for this article, that’s exactly what I did: after digging through a half-dozen old boxes of computer games, I dug through a half-dozen old boxes of computer game magazines. There, in Computer Gaming World #210 (January 2002), I found this old, forgotten article: Tom vs. Bruce in Rails Across America. That also happens to be the first-ever Tom vs. Bruce article. Almost eight years ago. No wonder I completely forgot how to play this game.

Revisiting this incredible game was one decidedly odd experience. Once I found that issue of CGW, I went back and read my review. It said totally weird things like, “This is a fast, playable, challenging game with a depth no boardgame can match.” Are you serious? How could anything be better than a boardgame? Except maybe the Indy 500.

I was much more of a gamer in the 1990s than I ever was in the 2000s, so I’m totally imprinted forever by the Railroad Tycoon series, although the first one was such a revelation to me that it’s hard for me to decide which one – the original or Railroad Tycoon II – had a bigger effect. I know I probably spent more time with the first one, for the simple reason I had more free time back then. But Railroad Tycoon II made an art out of micromanagement in a way that Rails Across America hints at, and then completely dismisses, like Col. Klink would do to Col. Hogan all the time in his office. All those detailed numbers are there, sure, but you really don’t have to pay attention to all of them, because there are some ingenious visual cues that allow you to get the big picture.

And you definitely need all of them. Sitting down with this game eight years later really brought home to me how inaccessible this game was in some ways. Why are my routes all losing money? How did some guy just come and take 60% of my cash? Why are all my routes congested? It takes a bunch of playings to get a feel for exactly how the game flows, because I didn’t remember this as being a micromanagement game, especially when played at the pace necessary for multiplayer. And in the end, it isn’t. Expansion and network building drives the game, and when time comes to optimize your system, things get decidedly less interesting. Flying Labs next big project, 2008’s Pirates of the Burning Sea, takes this concept to the next level, where you’re actually creating the economics yourself rather than sending rolling stock to go pick up someone else’s.

Pick a route, grab a city, upgrade your engines, go knock off a rival’s key route with a strike or sabotage: for a game with a lot of detail, the decisions mostly involve general strategy. Just like a boardgame. It’s the opposite of Master of Orion 3, where the detail was supposed to be gravy but ended up being the gristle. Rails lets you make big decisions and fiddle with detail when you want to, unless you have a live opponent on the other side, in which case you need to stay focused.

You can still download a demo copy of the game from C|Net, and if you look for used copies on Amazon.com, they run about $1.99 for the CD without a box. The manual comes on the CD in pdf format, so you’re not missing anything, although it looks like you could pay full freight ($50) for a new boxed copy if you really wanted to.

I have a shelf in my closet where I still have some old games complete in boxes: things like System Shock (original), Ogre, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and other things that mark milestones in my life as a gamer. I have Rails Across America on that shelf, which reminds me how much I loved it when it came out. A lot of that, I think, has to do with the great multiplayer games I played against Tom. It’s still one of my favorite multiplayer games ever.

In Computer Gaming World #213 (April 2002), the year-end awards section declared Rails Across America “The Best Game We Didn’t Get.” I was originally kind of put off by this little sidebar, tucked into the bottom corner of page 81. I felt like the magazine was saying, hey look, we know we gave this thing an Editor’s Choice award and all, but really, our freelancers are a buncha retards. And while in some ways that may in some ways be factually correct, I didn’t feel it quite applied to me at that particular moment in time. But the converse or contrapositive or whatever the correct term for the side of the coin that is supposed to make you feel better about a bad situation is, Jeff Green and Ken Brown and all the rest of the long-lost CGW crew had enough respect for us to let us give 4 ½ stars to a game they thought came from Dork Central Storage. Like they have a lot of room to talk with their wizards and necromancers. Bottom line, they didn’t kill the review, or even really complain, except in a little corner sidebar three months later.

Maybe the best thing that came out of the whole experience, besides being reminded how great Rails Across America was, was turning the page from my review to find Tom Chick’s half-page review of Dominions. The original one, Priests, Prophets, and Pretenders.

It’s an old, lost world of strategy gaming back then, and I sure do miss it.

On to 2002, and one of the best RTSes ever made.