poptop-software posts

Sometimes you just need to sit down, slide a floppy into your A: drive, and enjoy gaming retro style. We know this all too well! That's why we have a list of the best and brightest from days long gone. These are some of our favorite games of all time, and we're sure that you'll love them as much as we do, if not more. Welcome to Boot Disk, and enjoy the retro ride!

Last week we talked about one of the better business simulations, Railroad Tycoon 2. It's still considered a classic to most fans of the genre, but we talked about it plenty then. The developer, not content to merely work with Sid Meier's formula, decided to invent their own. The result was Tropico, a simulation of life as a tropical dictator. It is a satirical take on both Latin America politics and the business simulation genre, and serves as a good example for what a developer can make when it simply steps outside the box. PopTop may be no more, and the franchise may belong to a different publisher, but we can still reminisce about a strategy gaming classic.

Sometimes you just need to sit down, slide a floppy into your A: drive, and enjoy gaming retro style. We know this all too well! That's why we have a list of the best and brightest from days long gone. These are some of our favorite games of all time, and we're sure that you'll love them as much as we do, if not more. Welcome to Boot Disk, and enjoy the retro ride!

Sid Meier is known for two different franchises. The first is the seminal 4X franchise Civilization, which made his name a household one and propelled him to the heights of game designer super-stardom. The second is arguably just as known as Civilization, only with a different group of people: Railroad Tycoon. The first game was one of the very first business simulations released to the consumer market, and ever since then the games have only been getting bigger, better, and prettier. Arguably the best game in the series is Railroad Tycoon 2, and with its re-release on Steam, new strategy gamers can immerse themselves in a timeless classic at a very low price.

The 2005 turn based strategy game Shattered Union wasn't exactly a huge hit when it was released (indeed it turned out to be the last game for its developer Poptop Software; it's owner Take Two Interactive shut the studio down in 2006). The reviews were a bit on the average side as well. However its basic story premise of near-future where the US is split into several different countries is good enough to get Hollywood types to want to make a movie version.

According to Variety, Take Two has sold the movie rights to Shattered Union to blockbuster movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer. He plans to make the movie version at his long time studio partner Disney (where he is in post-production on the upcoming movie version of another game property Prince of Persia) Writer J. Michael Straczynski, best known to us geeks as the creator of the sci-fi TV series Babylon 5, will write the script adaptation. He's been mostly a movie writer for the past few years, scripting the recent Clint Eastwood directed drama Changling. He also co-wrote the action flick Ninja Assassin that's due in theaters November 25.

One of the more interesting strategy-sim game series is coming back via a new publisher and a new developer. Kalypso Media announced today that their have aquired the rights to the Tropico PC game franchise from publisher Take Two Interactive. Kalypso intends to release Tropico 3 this summer which will be developed by Haemimont Games.

At the moment details are scarce on Tropico 3 other than it will be based on the first game in the series released in 2001 by Take Two's now defunct Gathering of Developers brand and developed by the now defunct Poptop Software. That game had the player controlling a Caribbean island country as a dictator type in the present day (the second Tropico game, released in 2003, switched the game's premise to being a pirate in the Caribbean in the 18th century). Kalypso did say the game would have "...state-of-the-art graphics, complex gameplay similar to the other titles in the series and a comprehensive multiplayer mode."