Game review: Megastore Madness
There are a ton of time management games out there but I've never seen anything like Megastore Madness. Your parents have left for a couple of months so it is up to you to run the family store. In the beginning, there are three workers to help you. One restocks shelves, one helps customers and one is a cashier. Juggle the three of them to keep your shelves fully stocked and your customers happy. I went into this thinking that it could be a lot of fun. Instead, it's annoying. In a normal time management game, you only have one player to pay attention to in order to help customers or stock shelves or whatever. However, in this game, you have three that you have to control. It's not particularly easy to keep up with the items flying off the shelves, the little kids tossing toys all over the place (which the stockboy cleans up), helping customers find what they want and still cashing them out before they get angry. As a result, I ended up focusing mostly on the stockboy and customer-helping girl and completely forgetting about the cashier. Then the customers would get mad. To make matters worse, the game adds workers as the customers get more difficult.
This would have been a good game if there were fewer people for you to control. A person's attention can only be focused in so many places at once. Having to focus on up to 6 people is rather difficult. If you want to have that many helpers, then there should be some non-controllable characters in there. There is no reason for us to control the stockboys. They should be able to see what needs to be restocked or what needs to be cleaned up automatically. That would leave us, the player, to deal with just the customers' needs. It would still give us up to 4 characters to control but then our attention isn't focused absolutely everywhere and we can get things accomplished in a timely manner. As it stands, the game is just too chaotic to play properly.