Let's Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise

As an educational trading game, it's pretty cool. You have thirty days to drive all around Canada, checking out the sights while buying and selling pallets of goods. I have no doubt that the commodities traded have been researched and are pretty accurate in terms of which city produces what.

The downfall here is the game design. It could stand to be streamlined. Playing on my admittedly memory-poor netbook, it seemed as though the wait time in between each click and response was growing wider as the game progressed. Or maybe I was just growing impatient. Surely the game can't be tracking so very many variables as to eat up that much processing time? I know Choice Of Games is capable of tracking at least as much, yet I've never seen their games slow down like this.

On a more basic level, choices are presented as a menu with radio buttons for selection and a "submit" button that appears only once a choice has been made. I wonder why these choices couldn't have been single-click buttons instead. On the whole, it seems that there's a lot of unnecessary clicking-through involved, all contributing to a growing sense of tedium.

I gave up at Day 14. I've got a ton of other games to check out, and other work to do besides. If there's one hell of a payoff at the end, I haven't seen it.

On the whole, a neat idea but somewhat questionable in design. Rather like a breakfast of hard-boiled quail's eggs and maple-glazed back bacon: you're so busy peeling the shell off each egg between each bite that not even the prospect of bacon can remind you to enjoy the meal.