Ah, how I love time management games! They provide just enough fun to chew away a few hours without making me feel too guilty about ignoring whatever chore that needs to be completed. I do not consider myself to be a time management game aficionado, but I have had enough experience with them to know if a game is good enough to make me want to play one more level over and over again. So when I had a choice of which game I would like to review from Beatshapers, I picked up on Jane’s Hotel. The game’s premise is straightforward; Jane has achieved her lifelong dream to own a hotel and now she has to make it the best hotel in town.
The game has the usual slew of elements that make each level slightly more complex than the previous one. Besides being busy coming to the front desk to give room keys to guests, Jane will have to serve coffee, provide a telephone, a newspaper, dinner from kitchen, alcohol and also ask the pianist to play music when requested. If that is not enough, there is also a maid that she has to manage to handle cleaning rooms, watering plants, picking up dry cleaning, and delivering linens and golf clubs. Each task that you handle provides money as tips. The faster you take care of a request, the higher the tip. Guests also leave room payments at the front desk that you have to collect on a regular basis. The money you earn allows you to purchase hotel upgrades in turn increase the hotel’s popularity. But these hotel upgrades introduce elements that potentially increase your workload such as watering plants or taking care of guest requests at the lounge chairs you purchased. When your hotel’s popularity reaches a 100, you can obtain a star that bumps your hotel to the next level which leads to managing more rooms.
With a game that has it’s title as Jane’s Hotel, it was hardly surprising to come across typical hotel lobby music. This, of course, was not necessarily a good thing because after 15 minutes of hearing the same jazz music looping over and over again, I almost turned it off. Fortunately once I got involved in the game, I barely noticed it. There was also the slight issue of menu click sounds not syncing with the changes on the screen and the delay was very noticeable. The rest of the interactive sounds were a seamless part of the game.
The graphics for this game were overall decent though it had its share of glitches. Going through the help tutorial was very laggy and you could observe a distinct lag between the time you clicked to go to the next page, the sound of the click, and when the next page would display. The comic strip for the game introduction had text that was really hard to read on the PSP’s screen and flipping between the pages was slow here as well. The game HUD was also small and could have been a little bigger as the numbers and text seemed fuzzy. It would have also tremendously helped if the border highlighting the current selection was a little more obvious than a thin green line. There were also times when some of the background art would jumble up with the foreground picture when loading between stages.
When I was downloading the game, I was a little concerned about how a d-pad would work in time management game considering these games are all about speed, efficiency and handling tasks that do not necessarily line up right next to each other. Unfortunately I found that the controls were definitely a hindrance during the game. I could not figure out the system; the selection border moved when hitting the directional keys and hitting the up arrow key did not necessarily mean the item directly above it would get selected. I also found that the main character could not be moved to a different spot unless a corresponding action needed to be taken care of, so I could not strategically place Jane in a central location or a location to preemptively prepare for an upcoming request.
Numerous times I came across a glitch where if I picked up food from the kitchen and there were 5-6 other requests that need to be taken care of, I was unable to select the guest that requested the food at the table. In the larger hotels, the coffee maker would not have a selection border highlighting it and instead the adjacent room would show up as selected that was confusing and lead to wastage of time and ultimately a dissatisfied guest. When the hotel becomes bigger, the analog stick is used to pan left/right through the hotel. This game mechanic did not play well with the preexisting issue of selecting guests and keeping track of what requests came first. It was especially obvious when trying to service multiple guests with the same request item using the d-pad.
So besides the controls being bit challenging, I had to contend with the game crashing my PSP while loading game stages. But I still managed to finish the game in under 6 hours. Achieving success at each stage will require you to quickly cycle through selections, keep track of the order of requests, and chaining multiple requests of the same item. It is pretty evident that this game was made for a PC or even a touchscreen. Having it ported to a PSP without properly testing the execution of controls is the biggest hindrance to fully enjoying this game. After you manage to get past the various glitches and control issues, you realize that Jane’s Hotel was actually a decent game to pickup to blow away a few hours of your life.
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