The Bus Empire (巴士帝國)

Bus Empire rules by promising you one simple thing: watch the numbers and wait for them to become bigger numbers. The Bus Empire is a text-based bus management simulator on DOS where absolutely everything – and I mean absolutely everything – happens through menus and reading messages. No graphics, no animations. Just text that literally hits you in the face.

You play as a transportation magnate whose business is supposed to grow. You buy buses, rent routes, hire drivers who might skip work because they're depressed, and all you can do is read messages about what's happening. The game forces you to navigate countless menus and submenus. Every decision leads to another list of available actions. It's like entering a bureaucracy with no way out.

The mechanics are obscured and vague. Why did I lose money? What exactly was the strategy manager doing? The game doesn't know – or at least didn't tell me in any understandable way. Playing feels like having poisonous fish forced down your throat. Sometimes you manage to buy a bus, sometimes a route crashes, sometimes it doesn't. There's no path to actual fun; there's just failure and confusion about what you're reading on the screen.

With this piece, the world of simulation games moved significantly forward. Modern tycoon games turned The Bus Empire into something like shame and a warning. If you want to play a transportation management simulator, grab anything else – maybe Capitalism or Transport Tycoon. Those had their effect in their time with all that text and silence, but today it feels like a high school programmer's coursework.

Still: if you're drawn to old DOS simulations and aware of how far we've come, The Bus Empire offers a strange encounter with how gaming worked thirty years ago. It's not a bad game, it's just – and I really mean this – a boring game for a boring moment of a boring day.