Railroad Tycoon Deluxe

First things first. Railroad Tycoon is one of the great games, one of those classics that other games are rated against. In its genre it's up there with Sim City and Civilization as the essential buys. Now it's got even better. That's the theory anyway.

The plot of Railroad Tycoon is neatly summarised in its title (which is unsurprising I guess). You aim to be the Rupert Murdoch of the rail network. This involves not only building railway lines and buying trains and rolling stock to run on them, but also investing in stocks and shares and trying to buy into your rival companies until the word 'competition' is just a distant memory.

That's the original game. What does the Deluxe version offer? Well essentially it's the same game only more of it. The graphics have been tarted up, (i.e. vga) but then although quite - dare I say it - sweet, the graphics were never a major selling point of the game and to be honest, I wasn't bowled over backwards by the changes.

More importantly, there are new continents to develop (South America, Africa and Europe) and 11 new trains, giving you a total of 32 to choose from. All this adds to the options and variety of the game but not exactly by an earth-shattering amount.

Railroad Tycoon is one of the must buy games, so if it is still not in your collection then Railroad Tycoon Deluxe ought to be on your shopping list. However, for an owner of the original, this is basically a data disk (a fact tacitly acknowledged by MicroProse which is offering to upgrade original games to Deluxe versions for $19.99). But even if treated as a data disk Railroad Tycoon Deluxe doesn't offer quite enough, even at the less than $20.00 price bracket. Paul Lakin.