I’m reasonably sure that you’re familiar with Monopoly the board game. It’s a relatively loose interpretation of buying and selling real estate. So sure am I that I don’t feel any great need to explain to you how it works in any kind of great detail. Basically you buy, sell, and trade properties in an effort to run your opponents out of money.
The video game adaption of this game is pretty much exactly the same as the board game version, with a couple of kind of important exceptions. Probably the most significant for me were that: there were no tiny pieces to lose and calculating crap like Luxury Tax was way easier if I let the computer do it.
Also, I suppose I should mention that you can make computer players take the place of regular players if you don’t quite have enough to flesh out your game.
In all the times I played the old-fashioned analog version of this game, I don’t think I’ve ever actually played a game to the end. The reason being that this game takes hours upon hours to play if your players have any skill whatsoever. Well, that and as the turns progress they become logarithmically longer to complete.
That’s bad enough, but you can at least talk amongst yourselves and collude with each other to take down whoever’s in the lead. But, if you have the computer taking over one or more, then you can’t really expect intelligent discourse on… well any topic, really. You just kind of have to sit there while it does whatever crap it does, including offering you a ridiculously low amount of money for Marvin Gardens. And just kind of wait until it’s done its thing.
So, you play your turn, and then wait about fifteen minutes while it has its turn(s) before you can go again. In other words, play a turn, make and eat a sandwich, play a turn, mow the lawn, play a turn, wash the family goat, play a turn, etc.
After a few rounds of that, not only did I not actually finish my game of video Monopoly, but I never put it in my NES again, either.