It's like Sim City, but not. With Sim City your job was to take care of an entire city and all that is involved with that, but Railroad Tycoon 2 strips away all those other responsibilities and has the player focusing on one particular aspect: railroads. Railroad Tycoon 2 makes up for the lack of other city-like responsibilities by making you have to micromanage all that goes into the construction and maintenance of a healthy railroad all throughout the United States.

In reference to other games of this kind that have taken a similar route, the main problems that are inherited during the transition from a PC to a console are the general interface (the aforementioned lack of a mouse) and moving from a high-resolution monitor to a drab TV. Following the common path, Railroad Tycoon 2 has taken in both of these traits unfortunately well.

To make the interface more user-friendly for PlayStation owners it would likely mean that the people performing the port would have to rip the guts out of the game and rework it from the inside out. Due to constant demand to get a game out on shelves as quickly as possible, though, most of the time the game is fitted to work on a specific machine and then its out the door to shelves. In Railroad Tycoon 2 the movement of the cursor is done with the d-pad, and by moving along the edges you can scroll around the map to see the surrounding area. The problem with this, however, is that no matter what speed the cursor happens to be at it's far too easy to move the map father than you need to, and it becomes a matter of jerking back and forth to make it to the proper destination. Users that are lucky enough to own an analog controller will have the luxury of being able to use the analogs to move the cursor on the screen, and the d-pad to move the map. It still isn't perfect, but it was a heck of a lot easier.

Next up: resolution! This is probably one of the hardest parts of it all, seeing as how the sizing down of the resolution makes it so that the text is scrunched and incredibly hard to read at times and the graphics turn into buckets of crap. In terms of graphical flair, there was not much of it in the PC game (the depth is what won most fans over), and there does not seem to be a whole lot that was lost, barring the fact that it looks a bit uglier because of the lower resolution. The text, though, was a huge problem; it became squished and a pain to read. If nothing else, a little extra time spent making things readable would have been nice.

Though there are a few problems, that does not stop Railroad Tycoon 2 from featuring mounds and mounds of depth. The visuals got worse, but the gameplay sure didn't. Fans of the genre will be in hog heaven with the game, simply because of the sheer scope and detail that went into its creation are mind boggling. As soon as you think your corporation is running at its top condition, something will pop up that will have you off scrambling to recover whatever damage may have occurred. To those curious as to what the game is like, be forewarned that life in Railroad Tycoon 2 doesn't move very fast, and there is little action to be found. This is the type of game that you sit down and play for a couple hours at a time, not for a small portion of 15 minutes when you have a break.

There are two things that players just getting into the genre or into this game specifically should be aware of: 1) Take a look at that big old manual and actually read. I know, most of the time I don't care to flip through game manuals either, but it's an absolute must if you want to get anywhere without becoming overly frustrated. 2) Turn on the tutorial option. It was not overly helpful during my experiences, but it helped somewhat when I was a bit dumbfounded on what to do and where to go next.