Marco Polo

BOREDOM IS SPELT M-A-R-C-O P-O-L-O

A Review of Marco Polo

Set in Asia during the Middle Ages, you play the role of an aspiring merchant in I-Motion's Marco Polo. By buying low and selling high and completing missions entrusted to you by the various characters that you encounter throughout the game, you gain fame and fortune. In essence, Marco Polo is a market simulation. As such, there are no "victory conditions". You may stop whenever you wish, and you are given a score based on your wealth and prestige.

Marco Polo also tries to do one better on the market-sim genre by heavily employing multimedia. There are many short video sequences, and encounters with other characters are done with still shots and audio. While traveling through Asia, many of the events you hear of, or even participate in, are historically accurate. Many of the characters you meet, such as Kublai Khan, will also be based on historical personalities.

Another aspect of Marco Polo is the background information on the personality for which the game is named after. The story of Marco Polo's family and his travels is narrated to you while you watch a "slide show" that is occasionally interrupted by video clips. Unfortunately, this is perhaps the best part of the game, for at least it's educational. The rest of the game is rather boring.

First of all, I found most of the "multimedia" to be of very poor quality. Not so much the quality of the video clips, which are about average given the current level of video technology, but the quality of the still shots. While the low resolution graphics might have been great in the 80's, they fall short of ideal in today's high-tech world. I understand the need for the I-Motion to support as many video systems as possible, but the least they could have done was provide an option for those with the capability to support higher resolution graphics. The same goes for the audio. It came out very choppy, although I have to admit, this may be due to my slow double-speed CD ROM, which seemed to be working overtime even when the game was doing nothing buy playing the background music. When it wasn't choppy though, it was rather pleasant, if not a tad repetitious. Each town seemed to have its own little theme. However, I missed the ability to change the volume, or even switching off the music completely.

Which brings me to my next point: options! Boy, you never know what a luxury it is to be able to configure a game to suit your needs until it's taken away from you. Not only do I wish I could bump the video resolution up to 800x600 (or, heaven forbid, 1024x800), I also wonder about the sound card setup options. There are none! If you don't have a 100% Sound Blaster compatible sound card, you're out of luck. The game simply exits with a polite warning. Furthermore, even if you do have such a sound card, if it isn't on the 3 IRQ and DMA combinations they specify, you still can't use your sound card. Marco Polo doesn't have any configuration files, and doesn't copy anything to disk except for saved games. And even then, it will only save on the root directory.

And did I mention Marco Polo wants a whole 590 KB conventional RAM free? This posed a big problem to me to get it started. Don't forget, you need to have the drivers for your CD-ROM loaded, along with and sound card drivers you may have. Other than this, installation will go either one of two ways: it works, or it doesn't. This is very easy to determine, as I've mentioned before - you can't change anything about the game.

Within the game itself, while the interface was a breeze to learn, it tends to get tedious after a while. To travel to another city, you just click on it on the map. To buy trading material, you click on the marketplace and select the goods you wish to purchase. You can haggle over the prices by increasing or lowering your bids. As a market simulation though, I find that Marco Polo is very weak when it comes to data manipulation. The interface is capable enough when it comes to basic gameplay, but for more advanced functions, it's simplicity gets in the way. Accessing the records of your purchases to find out how much you bought something for can take a long time. You have to click through lists of everything you've ever bought before you find it.

And of course, nothing within the game can be customized either, so everything you do will be the same as the first time you did it. For example, when traveling from town to town, there's usually a video clip about the journey and the town. But do you really need to hear that "such-and-such is a bustling port with people coming from all over the world to trade for the silk cloth that's only availa... blah blah blah..." every single time you go there? And when haggling over the price for goods, if you've heard one sound clip you've heard them all. How I've often wished for the ability to turn all these sequences off. It's the little things like this that totally annoyed me when I was playing the game.

In the final analysis, I really can't recommend Marco Polo at all. It purports to be a market simulation set in the Middle Ages. But unfortunately, it also plays like it was made during the Middle Ages. It's boring and gets repetitious way too fast. The only glimmer of interest in Marco Polo is the background files. That way you learn something while dying of boredom.