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Prison Tycoon 4 Supermax-Cover

Prison Tycoon 4: SuperMax. Yep, that's right. It's a tycoon simulator featuring prison as its setting. It's also the fourth installment in a series you've probably never heard of. While SuperMax sounds like a chain of oversized grocery stores, no such thing is involved. Although, I'd much rather be at a grocery store, than play this prison of a game. From playing Prison Tycoon 4, I can see why the warden from The Shawshank Redemption shot himself in the head.
Essentially, you should avoid this game like Sean Connery tries to avoid The Rock. While there's nothing necessarily wrong with a prison game based on the tycoon formula, Prison Tycoon 4's biggest problem is its execution. First of all, this game comes with no manual, not even an insert. Most importantly, there is no in-game tutorial.
While this wouldn't really hurt, say, racing games or point-and-click adventures, developers should get locked-up for not including in-game tutorials for strategy management games. It gets exponentially more painful when you couple this with an unintuitive interface.
Hey, prison decorating.
Throughout your time as the warden, you will be confronted with all of the tasks of running a prison. This means acquiring inmates, managing your economy, assigning people jobs, and yes, you'll sometimes need to issue a beat down. You'll do this from a top-down isometric camera angle. But all of this is severely hindered by a lack of an in-game tutorial. As a result, you'll often know what to do, but not how to do it. It gets even hairier when you do know what to do, but your commands don't work.
One time I wanted to break up a fight, so I tossed some tear gas at the warring prisoners, but nothing really happened. They proceeded to beat the living snot out of each other. You can try to send prisoners to their cells by putting things in lockdown mode, but a lot of them won't retreat to their quarters; and the ones that do come back out after a few seconds. So you'll then want to send a guard to break up the fight, but figuring out how to do that without proper instructions is extremely frustrating.
Make sure your prisoners are pumping iron.
Since it's pretty much impossible to tell the difference between a guard and a prisoner in the yard, you'll have to open up the submenu. From there you click on the guard tab, select a specific guard, look at the minimap to check the whereabouts of the guard, close the submenu, investigate the most recent known whereabouts of the guard, locate and right mouse click the guy (you can't create a drag box to select anything in this game), move him into the action, right mouse click on a troubled prisoner, and select the beat him up icon. By the time you try to initiate all of this, a prisoner might have already died. If this all sounds convoluted it is. The whole game is like this, and it really hurts to not have a proper tutorial.
Prison Tycoon-Screenshot-1

Prison Tycoon-Screenshot-3

Prison Tycoon-Screenshot-3

System Requirements!

Cpu: 1.4 Ghz
Ram: 512Mb
VGA: 64 Mb
Hard: 800 Mb
Windows Xp,Vista,7

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