Sep 11, 2019Feature
With the new DLC for Two Point Hospital, Close Encounters, now available on Steam here (followed by console releases soon), we thought it was a great opportunity to dive back into the game! If you haven’t yet heard of this tycoon management game, you can check out the details with our review here.
Don’t be alarmed by the hospital setting; the illnesses you’ll encounter are all but ordinary and come with ‘punny’ alternatives. For example: Enjoy the visual details of someone walking into your hospital with a pan on their head and direct them to a treatment room where you remove it with a giant magnet! Since we wanted to get the most out of this game and feel compelled to achieve excellence, we went after the 3-star goals in every level. Below are some tips and tricks to help you avoid the same mistakes we made that resulted in figurative and literal dumpster fires.
You’ll notice that getting that first star is always quite easy but if you want to attempt the third, you’ll need to buy more plots and expand your hospital. This will obviously give you a lot more to manage. You might be making millions but when your expenses kick in, you can lose it all and maybe even go bankrupt if you’re not careful.
When you edit rooms, it kicks everyone out of them but don’t be afraid to rearrange or delete unused rooms as it will make things easier in the long run! You should also check up on your employees and fire staff that are under-performing. Then, keep checking your patients’ health and bump the ones that are near death up the queue line before they keel over! Finally, take your time and have fun!
Aug 25, 2019Feature
At myPotatoGames, we love cooking games. We love tycoon and management games, too! And we’re so happy when we uncover games on Nintendo Switch that are like hidden gems that encompass one or all of those genres. Check out Marenian Tavern Story, Automachef, World Tree Marche and Gym Hero for affordable family-friendly games with lots of foodie fun! All available right now.
You may not know this, but Marenian Tavern Story: Patty and the Hungry God is actually a sequel to Adventure Bar Story on the 3DS. But you don’t need to play one to enjoy the other! Patty is a young woman with a brother who has been possessed by the god of poverty. Because of this, her family has been saddled with terrible debt! You’re going to have to pay that back, and opening a tavern seems like the best way to do it. Explore, gather, fish and garden to get your ingredients, and uncover over 600 recipes to use them in. Level up by eating great food so that you can conquer dungeons and discover ever better and rarer ingredients. What kind of menu will YOU put together?
World Tree Marche is an easy-going game that won’t make you feel rushed or under pressure. You are the Royal Food Adviser, and you must run the world tree’s market. To do so, you will need to guide six chefs (all named after spices!) in creating new and exciting recipes to earn money for the struggling world tree and stop the terrible plans of the Gourmand Corporation. Each chef you work with has their own personality and story, as well as unique strengths and weaknesses. (See our previous article on World Tree Marche for a more information and a trailer.)
In Automachef, you may be more engineer than epicure, but that won’t stop the hijinks! Your job is to design (and build) automated restaurants. To do so, you will need to solve puzzles in spacial placement, resource management, and scenario-specific situations. You can do this in campaign mode, contracts mode, or let lose of all constraints in sandbox mode. Guide your somewhat hapless protagonist, Robert Person, to success, with lots of laughs along the way. See our pre-release article about Automachef for a full list of features!
At this point, you may have gotten TOO MUCH great digital food. To our surprise, the Switch has a game to balance that. In Gym Hero: Idle Fitness Tycoon, you get to take an unmotivated couch potato and spiff their empty little room up into their own personal gym. Buy exercise equipment, motivational posters and health supplements and press your character to use them properly. After all of that cyber-cooking, you can also reach your digital dream weight! Who knew?
If you’ve already drained the Nintendo Switch e-shop dry of cooking content, there’s more to look forward to in the future. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3 is entering early access on PC in January and we hope it will end up on Switch someday, like its predecessor. For the mother of all cooking games, check out Cooking Mama: Cookstar, latest in the Cooking Mama series, coming to Switch and PS4 in October!
Aug 22, 2019News
If you have been eagerly awaiting award-winning Planet Zoo’s release on November 5th, this is important news. Planet Zoo is offering not only the soundtrack, wallpapers and three unique animals (listed below) but is now going to give eager players access to a beta period of this Steam game that will run for two weeks, from September 24 to October 8. You can order on Steam right now. (Please note that this offer applies specifically to the Deluxe Edition.)
Planet Zoo seems like a no-brainer for animal lovers. It has a huge variety of animals, and in building habitats for them, you can pamper and care for all of them. For more information on keeping your animals happy, you can read our article on managing animal behaviours. But despite how it may seem, Planet Zoo is about much more than just the animals.
Even if animals aren’t your thing, perhaps you like to plan, strategize or build. Or make money! You’re going to need to do a lot of those things to create habitats, make happy animals, and lay out a beautiful zoo that brings in the visitors. Because you need to make money, or your zoo will go under.
There are many objectives to fill. Planet Zoo also has a Career Mode, which is like following a story stuffed with unique characters. And your animals aren’t the only ones you have to keep happy. Nor are the customers! You also need to look after your employees. You’ll need to build staff-only pathways for your employees to traverse the zoo. And they won’t be very happy if you don’t build enough staff bathrooms, either!
So even if you’re not particularly interested in animals, don’t write Planet Zoo off just yet. It has a lot to offer to any simulation-game lover. Read our articles (linked throughout this article), visit the game on Steam, or peruse the official website to get an in-depth impression of what this game is all about.
If you’re at Gamescom this week, you can try out Career Mode and the new online Franchise Mode, about which Frontier had the following to say: “You’ll also get to try the brand-new Franchise Mode, where you can build, research, develop and manage your own zoos alongside a global community of players. And even use the online Animal Exchange where you can trade animals to increase the genetic diversity and well-being of your animals and zoo.” See for yourself if you think it deserved to be chosen as Gamecom 2019’s Best Simulation Game!
Aug 16, 2019News
The developers of Planet Zoo, Frontier Developments, have just announced details about their new Career Mode which includes a main storyline and several characters with unique personalities. If you haven’t read our last article regarding Zookeepers from their last Developer Journal, you can do so here. We here at myPotatoGames are blown-away by the amount of details and realism the creators are putting into the game which is releasing on PC November 5th, 2019. Frontier Developments assure us that the new Career Mode will be different than what you might be used to if you played their Planet Coaster game. See below for the details on the new mode and the first two new main characters from the latest Dev Post.
In Planet Zoo’s Career Mode, you will go on a trip around the world with new characters, exciting objectives, and lots of decisions that can impact the success of your zoos. There’s a bunch of unique Scenarios that follow along a beautiful and adventurous story, written by Graham Goring – and as it’s part of the Planet universe, there will be loads of light-hearted humour and heart-warming moments!
Each Scenario has its own unique challenges, determined by the continent you’re in, the biome you’re utilizing, the weather, the temperature, and of course animal availability. There will be goals for you to achieve (Bronze, Silver, and Gold), which contain gameplay objectives that vary in difficulty depending on how far you’ve progressed through the story – there’s a lot of unique objectives to get stuck in too! Each Scenario will open up with an introduction to your new surroundings by a character; in the first part of the story, you will mainly be interacting with Bernard “Bernie” Goodwin and Nancy Jones.
Bernard is the owner of several zoos and has made it his life’s work to use them to drive positive change, saving endangered species and increasing animal welfare around the world. He is a warm and humorous character (he loves dad jokes!) who cares deeply for all people and animals alike. He sees the good in almost everyone he meets and wants to inspire others to follow in his path. Despite his age, he has the energy and zest for life of a man twenty years his junior!
Nancy has worked with Bernie for over thirty years and is a no-nonsense woman with a dry sense of humour. Nancy’s first job as a Zookeeper was actually at one of Bernie’s zoos! She’s gotten to where she is through hard work, common sense and passion for her job; a talent Bernard quickly recognized, leading him to promote her to Head Zookeeper – meaning she now leads the teams and expects them to have the same high standards as she does!
Planet Zoo has also recently been nominated for Best Simulation Game at the Gamescom Awards 2019! You can read all about Gamescom and how to watch the live-streams this coming Monday, August 19th, 2019. Frontier Developments say they will be demonstrating their new Career Mode, Gamescom Gameplay Demo, on Tuesday, August 20th, 2019 at 7PM BST on YouTube. Sandbox Mode is always fun and the best way to get super creative but we can’t wait to find out what kind of goals there will be for our zoos!
Aug 15, 2019News
Hundred Days is an upcoming simulation game with a page already on Steam. To us it seems like a cross between a farming game and a business-tycoon or money-management game, like Chocolatier. You arrange your field and grow crops of different types of grapes to harvest them in different seasons.
But in addition to that, you also choose the recipe for your wines. It’s not all about the type of grape. The grape’s growing conditions affect its quality and attributes. Even the type of yeast you use to ferment the grapes will have an impact on the wine’s final quality. If you want to make the big bucks in Hundred Days, you’re going to have to grow the best grapes and make the best wine.
You’re even going to have to manage the soil’s PH levels. PH levels are a measure of how acidic or alkaline your soil is, and would have an effect on your grapes’ final flavour. When you harvest will also affect their attributes. With such a level of realism, we think this indie developer, Broken Arms Games, must have a real passion for vineyards and winemaking! We look forward to becoming digital oenophiles, too, once Hundred Days releases.
Broken Arms Games uses the tagline “A game of choice, nostalgia, and winemaking.” We’re intrigued by where ‘nostalgia’ comes into play! We also like that every choice you make in the game has an influence on its outcome. We’re looking forward to discovering and growing every type of grape and figuring out every last type of wine we can squeeze out of them!
Watch the video here, or go directly to the official site for even more info. We hope Hundred Days will be releasing soon, because we’re ready to dive into those lovely vineyards!
If you like money-management or tycoon-style games, check out Planet Zoo, due for release in early November. Or if it’s the farming aspect of Hundred Days that appeals to you, then have a look at our list of farming games on console.