Mad Games Tycoon 2 – Legendary Mode Tips

Tips for Starting Legendary Mode

Things you need in Legendary to make the start of the game easier:

• Focus. Making games for all genres and using twenty different topics may sound like fun, but Legendary’s start is not about fun, it’s about survival (which can be fun with the right mindset too.) I tend to choose “Skill” as my special genre and make skill/puzzle games about Animals and Building Blocks* until the mid-eighties, when I have enough money to start fooling around.
• “Reroll” your start until it’s not a waste of money by itself. This is another “cheating” (pfffft!) thing. If the genre unlocked at the start is either racing or adventure, restart the run. If either of those are trending, and not skill or puzzle, restart the run. If you don’t have at least one topic that’s good for skill or puzzle, restart the run. If your three starting employees are either flawed or over-inflated by worthless perks (“Likes Nature” or other “need everyone to have this one for it to be useful” perks,) yes, you guessed it right, restart. If the contract games you get at first are all/mostly racing or adventure… Yup, once again your guess was right, restart. In short, if the game seems to not want you to enjoy the first year of playthrough, might as well try again until the game stops being a scornful little asshat.
• “Minimalist” building will get you far in Legendary. You’ll have time to put paintings in every bit of not-sound-studio wall and add plastic plants to your every corner when you’re swimming in billions, but at the start of the game, any piece of furniture or decoration that’s not needed is going to make it harder for you to have the money for things you do need.
• Graphics/sound employees are a liability in the development room. I never have them, never needed them. Choosing genres that need less points on those two elements helps: Skill and Puzzle are both light on the graphics/sound requirements. And no, you can’t directly see what those requirements are (unless, I’m guessing, you can look at the code,) because the developer loves to be “mystical” about things like those. Only through observation, testing and failure did I figure out I needed at least 250-80-80-150 points (plus every “game element” above three stars) for a Skill/Puzzle game in 1976 to make it to 90%+
• Subtopic/subgenre are a must. While they’re always going to give you extra review score, in Legendary there seems to be a penalty for not having a subgenre or subtopic, even in 1976. Almost as if the game counted “no sub-genre/topic” as “zero experience.”
• A small trick about contract work: You may have noticed that sometimes they don’t give you experience in everything you include. This is due to each ‘start’ having a random chance to not be gained when completing a game, and the lower the review score, the more chances it has to not give you a star. Also, the more stars you have for something, the more score weighs on chances. Ultimately, this means the old method of “just make a contract that barely cuts the target review score” will only be good enough for game elements with zero or one star, and even then, chances are high they won’t give you any experience. So treat contracts like they’re “normal” games. If you can get them to 90% within one month of time, do so, specially if you have game elements** that are at three stars or more.

*Topic synergy is important for focusing. “Animals” and “Building Blocks” aren’t just a random choice – they work for both Skill and Puzzle, which makes it possible for me to throw some Puzzle/Skill games out every now and then.

**And just in case, “game elements” means everything a game’s made of in MGT2. Platforms, genres, topics, gameplay/engine features. The more stars you have for all of them, the better, and if any of them has two or less stars, your review score is going to be hurting a bit (and the more things below three stars you have, the more your review score hurts.) This also seems to “cap” your review score. If you have too many “game elements” below three stars, then no amount of improvements, polishing and slider-juggling will get you above 70%.