Prime Time (known as TV Mogul outside of the United States) is a game that I remember playing extensively through middle school. You take the role of the president of a television network and have to fill a schedule to compete against the other networks in this cheesy business simulation.
To fill your schedule, you can choose between some of the pre-existing shows that came with the game (most of which were parodies of real television series from the late 1980s), or you can create your own shows (like the super-popular Mexican version of Doogie Howser, M.
D. or "Mork and Mindy Meet ALF" that my friends and I created in our game).
The main screen that you will use during the play of Prime Time, is your office. You will check messages, read the daily entertainment newspaper (a parody of Daily Variety), and check the TV Guide-style listings. Beware, though, of some of the extremely hack jokes that abound within the game. You can always tell someone "Let's Do Lunch" or some other god-awful Hollywood cliches.
At its soul, Prime Time is a business simulator based on running a network. Many critics say that the game suffers from programming flaws that take away from the realism of the game, and I would have to agree. There are times when things just
seem to happen for no apparent reason in this game. While this may have been done intentionally to make the game more challenging, I tend to think that it was just shoddy programming by designers that were either lazy or inexperienced.
This is not a great game by any means, but for those of us that grew up playing this, it has tremendous sentimental value. I remember buying this game for $10 at a local computer show, and definitely getting my money's worth by the time I had upgraded to a computer that was too sophisticated to run this game.
Graphics were about par for the course at the time, and really have aged poorly. Sound was terrible, as I remember playing with my stereo on instead - but then again, most games had terrible sound back then anyway.
If you haven't played this game before, you probably would be better off playing some of the other, more polished network simulators including Mad TV and Hollywood Mogul.
