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As odd as it is to admit, I have a rather personal connection to Monopoly. From the period shortly following my parents’ divorce through to my early adolescence, Charles Darrow’s classic boardgame was a regular fixture in my life. Every other weekend my sister and I would pile over to our father’s house, and on Sunday afternoons we’d regularly bust out Rich Uncle Pennybags and co.
These games didn’t always run smoothly; my sis and I would always argue over who got to be the dog, and I distinctly remember that on one occasion my Dad set up a ridiculous deal where he sold her Mayfair, and then didn’t have to pay the first three times he landed there. There was also the day when the smoke alarm went off during the preparation of a particularly volatile cooked breakfast; Dad tried to waft away the smog, grabbed the nearest thing to hand – the Monopoly box – and then ended up showering the flat in paper notes and plastic houses.
In the year I spent between college and university, I used to play the game with a trio of mates on a semi-regular basis. At first we did it as a semi-ironic thing, the follow-up to a drunken session in the pub one night, and then over time it slowly morphed into a regular activity. Games would go on for hours, with each of us trying to out-do the others with daft, rule-breaking business deals. It was a bit tragic, I suppose, and yet somehow not. My own set eventually died during my first year as a degree student; I engineered a cash-free Monopoly variant, one where you had to down a can of beer when you wanted to buy a property. I’m pretty sure I ended up naked that night. I usually did.
The problem faced by EA’s Monopoly Streets is the same one that thwarts any Monopoly adaptation: it’s virtually impossible to make a video game that matches the fun of the genuine article.
To its credit, Streets is one of the better attempts I’ve seen – and believe me, I’ve been through a lot of them. For starters, there are oodles of rulesets on offer. You can stick with the classic setup, rush through a quick game, or try your hand at something stranger. Speed Die adds a third dice into the mix, one that sometimes grants special movement options. The Bus and Mr Monopoly icons give you a limited degree of choice over where you land, while rolling a triple lets you move to any square on the board. Rolling three doubles in a row still sends you to Jail, but there’s no mention of what happens if you hit three triples; at I guess, I’d suggest that your face melts like that bit at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
One of the other revisions, Bull Market, takes the unusual step of auctioning off all the properties at the start of the game. This arrangement actually requires a fair bit of strategic thought, forcing players to carefully consider the sites they bid for – when to keep quiet, and when to muscle out the opposition. It’s an interesting concept, but as with the other oddities, I suspect most players will largely ignore it in favour of the core game. On the positive side, you’re able to create and save your own custom setups, adding or removing rules as you wish. If you always used to bung tax payments onto Free Parking, or give yourself £400 for landing on Go, you’ll be able to do that here.
Along with all the weird remixes of the vanilla game, Streets offers a broad variety of boards to play on. Traditionally this is an area where Monopoly video games fall on their arse, and sadly EA’s effort is no exception. The main Streets board transforms the flat layout into a 3D cityscape, replete with pop-up buildings, while each of the iconic player pieces becomes a large prop that is driven/worn/accompanied by an animated character. The latter spout Sims-like gibberish and generally exude the kind of charisma that earns you a tyre-iron to the face – but if you’re playing on the Xbox 360, you can choose to play as your Avatar instead.
The real issue with the city, however, is that there’s absolutely no need for it. Someone, somewhere, has spent hours trying to come up with a way to modernise the game’s look – a way to justify the fact that you’ve spent £30 on a boardgame port. It’s a nice enough idea, but it hasn’t been designed with practicality in mind. If you’re not intimately familiar with the layout of a Monopoly board (i.e. if you’re not a freak like me) you may struggle to see where each property sits in relation to everything else. You can summon up an overhead view of the board, but sometimes this option isn’t immediately available, requiring you to back-track through various menus. Some of the other unlockable boards are simply the classic layout with a different palette – Jungle Monopoly, Landmark Monopoly, Cheese Monopoly – but if you don’t want to have to struggle with remembering which dairy product correlates with each property (Red Leicester Square, anyone?) you’re better off sticking with the original.
Still, I can’t be too harsh on Monopoly Streets. The game does a solid job of handling things like Auctions and Mortgages, and the deal-making tools are relatively flexible, although the AI-controlled opponents are fairly stupid and easy to dupe. It’s probably worth mentioning that the in-game tutorials are quite threadbare, but Hell – if you’ve just read 900-odd words of my waffle without knowing what Monopoly is, you’ll probably enjoy the masochism of just jumping straight in.
The donkey-like intelligence of the computer players isn’t that much of a setback in the long run, as the game works far better with human opposition. Online play seems decent enough, but you’re limited to a maximum of four players. I should also mention that one of the games I tried hit some kind of error halfway through, leaving my moustachioed avatar dancing on the spot in an endless loop, looking for all the world like a mentally ill Errol Flynn clone. One of the other players blamed the fault on EA’s servers; whether or not that’s true, we lost over an hour’s worth of progress.
Should EA have built in some kind of game-saving facility to rescue such accidents? I don’t know, but it’s certainly true that this never happens when you’re playing with an actual Monopoly set. The closest you get is when you piss someone off so much that they throw the board across the room and call you a twat, and even then that counts as a victory of sorts.
While we’re on it, a video game can only let you go so far in fiddling with the rules. You can’t create ludicrous business alliances (“Let’s set up a three-way coalition!”), or scribble in biro on Community Chest so that one card reads, “You rob the bank”. These things may not exactly benefit the game, exactly, but they’re part of what makes Monopoly fun. EA hasn’t done that bad a job here, but I’d personally rather stick with the real thing.
