I want this, will go great next to my copy of Pirates!

Ok, not much interest here it seems, but I feel like a kid on Xmas morning today. Going to pick this up at lunch, anyone else?

I need someone else to pick it up so we can try multiplayer.

I am going to pick it up but am pretty busy through October, so its more like a November thing for me. There's also the Dwarf Fortress problem.

I'm getting it, but it'll be in the queue for a short tryout, then back to TQ, SE V and Dominions III. And Eve.

Kat, I hear it's so good it makes you money because you're so much happier and wiser after playing it.

I hate you all. (*starts measuring the oven to replace it with an ATMeier*)

It is IN at the local EB, in some quantity. I have it and will soon fire it up. Mwuwahahahahahaaaaaa!

Too many good games coming out today... This may be the winner though.

Just finished the tutorial and first suggested scenario. This is NOT RRT2 or RRT3; it's the return of RRT1.

The game abounds with ways to make money. At the same time, you have to spend it, too. And the clock is ticking. I set the scenario to "Hard Routing", which means one train per line; that added something to think about. In the end, I was entranced by the routing and scheduling stuff that was going on. There were a TON of places I wanted to go to, but I literally could not spare the time to do it all. And this was with no competitors on easy level! I can't wait for it to get harder.

This is a game of simple mechanics. You don't place or set signals, you just lay track. Lay it for short distances and you can control the angle - longer sections produce big, sweeping curves (unless you are just heading for a straight line). You lay your track between two locations, always attached to your existing track (you start with a depot and a short run of track in one town). Click on a depot and place it for each city. Buildings shift and terrain adjusts to accomodate you - no more ripping up track because you didn't leave room in a city for a terminal, or because you were just a hair off on a river crossing. I can't say how wonderful that is. Sure, my cost goes up because my bridge is ill-placed, but dammit, that's why I'm the millionaire and you're the engineer, and I'll throw money at the bridges till they are built if I feel like it! This is a "do what I mean" interface, and I love it.

Buying and scheduling trains is the same thing - simple, simple, simple. Upgrading occurs automatically. Another micromanagement worry gone. Upgrading buildings and buying industries? The icons are right on screen. Select, click, approve, done. You can easily check your trains, consists, profits, etc. And when you mouse over a location, everything it supplies and demands just hovers there for you to see. No more clicking into the station to get info, everything can be seen at the main screen level.

So I was a kid in a candy shop. I built lines that centered on Bullhead City to cattle farms, Las Vegas, LA, wineries, so on and so forth. I started trains running. Then I noticed...I needed to double-track. Trains were stopping. Okay, I'll do that. Then as my lines got more complicated, I actually had to consider - do I want more trains on those tracks? Or should I concentrate elsewhere? Or triple-track? Quadruple? The costs are not entirely pretty, and just as with freeways, the more lines you have, the more you want to runs trains on them. (Note that this was a function of my picking Hard Routing, I could have gone easier and just left this abstract.) While I was thinking about this, if I'd had a competitor, he could have been setting me up six ways from Sunday.

Focus on business, people. That's what this game is about. Pick your routes to get the big money consists, make sure you have enough track to run the trains you want, keep upgrading your facilities and you'll be able to expand. Feed the cities what they want and take what they produce to the other cities. But if you lose track, or get lost in the weeds like I did, you're gonna go down. Not because you didn't have a cool train network, but because you didn't play the business game.

Finally, finally, we get the return of the no-fiddly-bits Railroad Tycoon, but with the good stuff added in. No offense to Phil Steinmeyer, he's a great guy, but this has the Sid Meyer touch. It's gold.

I've been trying to play the game this evening. The gameplay seems OK, but I can't go for more than 30 minutes without the game crashing.

Other than the crashing, my other main complaint with the game is the double tracking setup. Holy f*cking sh*t. They have made a simple thing into something so extraordinarily complicated that no matter how you try, you can't get your trains to route correctly.

If you haven't played the game, double tracking involves laying a track parallel to one of your current tracks. Seems simple, right? But here's the catch. You have to manually connect the tracks. You could lay double tracks and the second one would never get used, because you don't put a switch in. To connect the tracks, you have to put in a crossover. But the crossovers seem directional, so one crossover won't work if you have trains running in both directions. And woe betide you if you attempt to connect a piece of track into a double tracked section without going through a station.

Someone let me know if I'm missing something here, but I'm having hell with keeping my trains routed and running correctly.

I had the exact same problem. I was so excited about this game that I preordered it (turns out my EB received only one copy -- my preorder; PC games aren't getting any respect from Gamespot (I know, this is not news....)), but boy does the double track laying system suck. Also, I was unable to complete the tutorial despite trying three different times -- it wasn't that I could understand what it was asking for or trying to train me, but rather that it failed to realize that I had either purchased the train that it requested I purchase (or in another instance that I had upgraded the depot), so it refused to move the tutorial dialog to the next step. Very frustrating.

I eventually gave up and just played the first scenario. Pretty straight forward and easy to do. But figuring out how to manually attach your second track to your first track is difficult and something that should be automated. Very, very frustrating.

I am going to need more time with it tomorrow before I have all of my thoughts on this game. I am hopeful that with some practice I can get used to the second track connection issue, but it seems an oversight from a design perspective. Perhaps this can be fixed in a patch.

My only other issue is that it is difficult to scroll around the screen at times and I would prefer that the zoom feature would allow a closer and (more importantly) a farther zoom out. Just navigating the first map to find the three cities that I would need to connect up was difficult. Since it is the same engine as Civ IV, I would have assumed that the game could have zoomed much farther out.

I have played RRT I, II and III. I will play this one and would like to try multiplayer at some point....

I wonder, did you stop time to do this? Maybe that was it.

Eh? How do you lay more than one at a go? That would make things even easier.

However, you can put multiple tracks side by side to at least 5, no problem.

I'd say that SimGolf was a fun diversion. I enjoyed it for about 20 hours, but after that I felt like I'd done all I was going to do with it. Honestly, it would make a great GameTap game.

Once a patch comes out, and once GoGamer has a special, I'll have to pick up Railroads. Sounds pretty promising.

Yep, I can put 5 tracks adjacent to each other and connect them lavishly with crossovers. The little pedestrian bridge only covers three of them though.