You're the manager of all aspects of the railroad business in Railroad Tycoon 2. Right off the bat, it seems like an incredibly daunting task, but there are more than a couple ways to become more comfortable with the gameplay. Contained in the thick Dreamcast manual are detailed explanations of most of the game's options that are required to get you on your feet. Laying down train tracks and connecting them to train stations is easy enough to figure out, but learning how to control supply and demand, working with stocks, and the economics of managing the railroads spread over massive amounts of land are things that aren't going to be discovered by randomly clicking everywhere. If reading through a ton of pages doesn't sound like fun, however, there is also an included tutorial in the game that transfers all the information from the manual into a playable form.

One of the problems with Railroad Tycoon 2 on the PlayStation was that the change in resolution from a powerful hardware accelerated PC was a bit much, and the game's quality suffered as a whole. For the Dreamcast version, however, Tremor went through the effort to take the high-resolution 2D visuals used in the game originally and totally reorganize it into an entirely 3D polygonal piece of work. The work has definitely paid off in spades; while Railroad Tycoon 2 might not be the type of game that you show off to your friends, its visuals are clean and sharp at an impressive 640x480 resolution, and the garbled text problem present on the PlayStation has been replaced with an easy-to-read font. Maneuvering around the interface is no problem, either; instead of moving around the map by moving the cursor to the edge of the map, the player has to hold down the L button and then the analog is used to move around, while X, Y, A, B are used to rotate and zoom around.

Other than the new 3D engine that Tremor created, the other addition that will attract previous Railroad Tycoon 2 fans include the addition of 70 (yep - count 'em, seventy!) new scenarios that are taken both from the Second Century expansion pack that was released on the PC, as well as all-new scenarios that cannot be found anywhere else. Unfortunately, the online feature that had been bragged about when the game was first announced was removed since SegaNet was not operational in time during development, and implementing player-to-player support through the modem would have delayed the game significantly. It's extremely disappointing to see the online feature missing, but alas.

These are not the usual types of games that we see arriving on console platforms, but the new features that Tremor and Gathering of Developers have worked on making for the Dreamcast conversion of Railroad Tycoon 2 make it worth checking out.