The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

It’s Friday the 13th! oooOOOOOoooh! And what better way to scare yourself than by reading about BAD GAME DESIGN DECISIONS! ooooOOOOOOOOOOHHHH!

Anyway, Tropico 3. I was playing along, quite enjoying my time with the game. I mean, it’s got a clever angle, and it’s pretty fun, although I knew it wouldn’t be fun that would last for me. Still, I was having an enjoyable few hours with it before I returned it to Gamefly.

I got to a mission where I was on an island that sucked at farming. So the game, after I get going, pops up a tooltip: why not build some fishing wharfs in order to make sure your people have enough food? A great idea! I didn’t know that was an option! A flat beach area is the only place you can really build one of those, but luckily, my island had a long beach off to the side of the dock the game started me with. I prepared to build some fishing wharfs there, and soon enough, they were completed. All I needed then was to hook up the wharfs with roads so the fish could be transported quickly and get everyone fed. I whip out my road-building tool and start putting a road there.

Only I can’t.

The game will not let you build roads with really sharp turns. The game will also not flatten terrain that it considers too intense, like, say, the little rocky mountain thing by the beach where the dock and wharfs are. It also doesn’t let roads intersect with buildings.

The initial placement of the docks was such that there was no way to build a road around them to the only place where you could build those wharfs. You’d either make the road clip into the area blocked off for the dock, so you couldn’t build it, or you’d hit the mountain, so you couldn’t build it, or the road would turn too sharply, so you couldn’t build it. You simply couldn’t get trucks to these wharfs. It was impossible to actually set up what the game’s tool tip told you to do. It took me like 20 minutes of trying desperately to move shit around to figure this out. I restarted the mission three times, figuring I must have placed SOMETHING in the wrong location. Nope. It’s just impossible.

Needless to say I quit that mission immediately and played another one. But thanks for that, Tropico 3! That was pretty frustrating.