Aerobiz

The Game

Aerobiz was developed and published by Koei who are well known for their strategy/tactics games, from the 80s through the 00s with series like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga's Ambition, Pacific Theatre of Operations, and many many more. Most games of theirs were very highly received, and to anyone into these sorts of games they will be very well known, despite some of their games going more under the radar, such as this one. It was also released for the Mega Drive/Genesis, and various Japanese home computers.

Gameplay

This is a pretty in depth strategy game, you take control of an airline and have to make various business decisions to ensure you are the number one airline out of the 4 people playing, and yes, this can have a full 4 player scenario running which I think would've been great fun at the time. If you don't have other players the seats are filled by CPU players and the actual gameplay experience is the same. There are 2 scenarios to choose from, start in 1963 - 1995 or 1983-2015. I went with 1983 so I could get myself a nice fleet of Concordes. Yes, this game is fully licensed (not the sort of licensed game I thought I'd be dealing with on the SNES, where is the early 90s box office flop movie tie in?!) Boeing, Concorde, Airbus all licensed for this game which is a nice little feature.

You start by choosing your base of operations, which is basically your way of choosing difficulty. Pick a big city, New York, London, Tokyo etc and you'll have an easier time, but choosing smaller places, or somewhere like Moscow will make your game a lot harder. You then buy your planes, and negotiate with other airports to open routes, set your ticket prices and your game starts there.

It's like Sim City or Theme Park, but it feels more in depth despite not actually really being all that much more in depth. You have board meetings, financial reports and all that great spreadsheet stuff you get from strategy games like this, and there are real world issues that crop up. War in Iran raises oil prices, the Olympic Games will drastically increase travel to the host country so you need to consider opening more routes in advance. You can dabble in marketing and open hotels and new bases of operations in other countries to link everything together with the ultimate goal being to earn the most money, and have the most customers while trying to link all 22 cities together.

You can lose the game by going bankrupt or hitting the 32 year time limit. It's a great little niche title, and the fact it's just so different than everything else I've played recently was nice. A well deserved break from middle of the road platformers.

Graphics

The game looks nice for what it is, but there isn't much to talk about when it comes to the graphics. The Japanese home computer versions obviously looked the best, but the SNES does a nice job of showing you a nice world map, decent character sprites for the various people you talk to and nice bold clear icons for all the sections you navigate through.

Sound & Music

There isn't much to talk about in the way of sound, but the music in the game is pretty decent. 35 minute soundtrack, so maybe not a huge amount of variety, but what's there is good. You get so lost in the gameplay that you don't really concentrate much on the music though it has to be said, but a listen to the soundtrack without playing the game does showcase some really nice upbeat tracks that are very nicely put together.

The People

Now this is a weird one, the only person I can find credited on this is the game's producer Kou Shibusawa. He was one of the co-founders of Koei, and has worked on over 100 games as a producer but also was behind the story of 2017's souls like Nioh.

The opening credits of the game just lists the various licenses they have for the planes in the game, and the ending is just a series of digitised images of planes while music plays. There just doesn't seem to be any credits anywhere for it. If you know of any, or if Mr Shibusawa is reading this, if you'd like to drop me a list of the people that worked on this obscure SNES version of a PC strategy game from 34 years ago that would be great!

Box art

Now, as much as I love this box art today, 6 year old me would not have been remotely interested in a game showing a business man answering a phone looking out an office window. It wouldn't sell it to me at the time, but now there's so much here that I love. The actual art is quite nicely done, the plane is nicely detailed due to the fact it's about ten feet from the window, and I love that this man appears to be working in New York, but can look out of his office window and see Paris, Tokyo, London and Moscow. So much to look at here and that's what I love to see.

As for the back, we've got our usual 4 screenshots, and they're about as good as any could be for a strategy game like this, they need to sell the different situations that can come up more than the gameplay and it does that nicely. The written description on the back is clear and accurately describes the game nicely, and we have my favourite. Bullet points!

• 1-4 Player competition - completely accurate, I just wish I was able to try it out.

• Buy and sell aircraft - again, accurate, maybe slightly scraping the bottom of the barrel of selling points here though.

• Expand around the globe - Yup, also pretty much covered in the actual aim of the game, but sure!

• Realistic business strategy - I'll give it this one, I'm not a businessman, I can't say what's realistic and what's not but I spent quite a lot of time in boardroom meetings so I feel like it's realistic.

Overall I give this box my rating of - Accurate, even if some of the bullet points were fairly self explanatory.

The Press

Electronic Games:

AeroBiz is sure to bring out the managerial wizard in each player. It combines strategy and real-life business practices while remaining fun.

86/100

Super Play:

Aerobiz looks good, with little pictures appearing when something happens - a little plane takes off and lands in Mode 7 every time you open a new route, that sort of thing. In fact the game has Super Nintendo written all over it (three times on the box, and twice on the cartridge, if you count). But there is a problem: there just isn't enough to do. The trouble I had was that I spent my first few goes opening as many routes as possible As a result I took more money and more passengers than my competitors, and yet I made considerably less profit. It transpires that it's better to limit your routes - concentrate on flights in and out of just one country, say. So if you play the game properly, you'll spend most of your time nurturing your existing routes rather than making any major changes to your enterprise. Sure, this is how real businesses are run, but it's all a bit boring really, isnt it?

69/100

Digitiser:

Let's be honest. The only people who are going to enjoy this are the sort you see milling around the spectators' gallery at Gatwick with a grubby copy of "Polish Air Freight 1956-72" and a large banner reading: "I have absolutely no friends whatsoever."

2/5

Oof, that last one hurt. Cheers Biffo!