Railroad Tycoon 2

There are two really major problems with the game: you can't save incomplete games, and a really obnoxious lockup problem, at least on my PS2.

The inability to save in-progress games is understandable--it would be a challenge to get even a single map to fit on a memory card. 128K isn't much room for this sort of game.

The lockup problem happens randomly when I'm in one of the menus. It's happened three times in a row after I've spent an hour or two building a really complex rail network (in one of the Australian scenarios), and thanks to the lack of a save feature that means all the work I've done is lost. Admittedly it may be PS2-related, but it would be the first PS2-specific game problem I've run into (and I've tried at least 50 old PlayStation games on it).

The interface is poorly implemented, which added to my initial frustration with trying to learn the game. It takes a long time to become comfortable navigating the menus with the joypad... what it really needs is a mouse. The most noticeable issue is that the pad behavior is inconsistent. In some screens the pad moves the cursor around the screen, but in other screens it performs other functions like highlighting buttons even though the cursor is still on the screen. (I could go on for hours about other problems with the controls, but I won't bother...)

Other people have mentioned graphics and text issues, but I haven't found these to be major issues. I suspect the text would be hard to read on a small TV, and the font they used isn't that good. The graphics aren't super, but they aren't horrible either--they're adequate. No music? That's a feature!

Once I got over the initial "how does this work?" part Railroad Tycoon II turned out to be a really fun game; it ranks up there with SimCity or any of the other classic simulation games. But the Playstation version just wasn't a good idea, especially with the lack of a save feature; I'll be playing the Linux version instead.