Porn Tycoon

It may be shunned by the mainstream press and rarely spoken about among friends (unless it’s done very loudly to embarrass the person in question), but pornography is a huge global business.

It makes sense, then, that it’s the subject of the latest game from HandyGames, following the long line of titles that take the ‘Tycoon’ from Railroad Tycoon and replace the first word.

Your job, as proprietor of a number of sex shops, is to keep the punters coming and splashing out on merchandise. (That's the last double entendre).

To do this you have to purchase such classy equipment as magazine racks, adult toys, lap-dance tables, and ‘video booths’ to allow the customers to find what they want.

This is all performed using a simple cursor-driven system, with a contextual menu popping up if an object is selected, and all the relevant information like 'day', 'money', and 'reputation' displayed at the top of the screen.

Certain features – like tabletops and blinds – need to be manned by female staff members (as it were), and offer the chance of playing small mini-games in order to prise extra cash from the punters.

These games mainly revolve around matching up buttons to on-screen prompts, and while they’re quite a nice distraction at first the sheer amount of cash that can be made by playing them does somewhat dent the management part of the title.

The lack of any useful function for the staff members that aren’t involved in a mini-game is also a little perplexing. There's an option to send them off to restock the shelves, but this has to be done manually and therefore could be just as easily performed by your own custom-designed character.

The presentation of Porn Tycoon is eccentric.

Every type of fetishist is depicted walking through the doors of the shop, each drawn in an amusingly cartoony fashion, and it’s always entertaining to see just what bizarre character will pop in next.

Even the descriptions of the objects have a fair degree of tongue-in-cheek charm, giving the game a great atmosphere reminiscent of a certain PC hospital title that shared the Tycoon name.

While there isn’t as much freedom to create a business as in that game, Porn Tycoon’s balancing of stock, paying the rent and staff, and expanding out with new ‘toys’ does end up being absorbing, and the well structured levels do a good job at keeping things focused.

The ease at which the mini-games generate cash when compared to the management side of things harms the title’s ambitions somewhat, but there’s no reason why it deserves to be kept hidden from a wider audience.