Where could you buy a house in Oxford Street for £200? Monopoly, of course. Traditionally this would be achieved by displaying your 'Oxford Street' card to the banker, handing over a couple a pink ones and getting a small, green piece of plastic in return.
But the advance of technology means that, having purchased a copy of the Amiga version, the transaction is accomplished by picking 'Buy Houses' from the 'Build' menu, moving your cursor to Oxford Street and waiting for £200 to be deducted from your account.
Apart from subtleties like that, this is more or less an exact replica of the board game, and its appeal will depend entirely upon your opinion of the original.
To recap, Monopoly's a sort of 'property' game, where loads of players sit round a board throwing dice, buying squares and building houses and hotels on them. There's a fair amount of skill involved, but success in the long run is governed mainly by chance - you just have to hope you land on squares worth buying and, having blown all your hard-earned on a streetful of hotels, that everyone else lands on them before you go broke. And that's what I hate about it, quite frankly.
It seems an enormous waste of effort to spend hours planning strategies when success or failure is likely to be dictated by a single roll of a couple of dice. No-one seems to agree, though, so I'm probably just being my usual nihilistic self.
The logic of converting such a game to computer is another matter. I can't really see six players gathering round the Amiga after dinner, so the only advantage of it seems to be the availability of computer-controlled opponents to practice against. And even that seems a bit silly. It's a perfectly good conversion, then, but a bit of a pointless one.
