The first major game to feature the National Neopian Bank, a source of income for many, sees you, the player, as the elected person in charge of bank security. After all, if no one was in charge, how is the bank able to make and maintain their money used to pay you interest on your savings? For some strange reason, the bank has 6 doors which is most likely due to the sheer volume of customers it receives (can anybody say monopoly? There’s only one bank in the entire economy – omigosh?). Each door has a deleted red button which you are able to press when you see a shady character appear.
Making your job a heck of a lot easier for you, the robbers i.e. shady characters, always appear when the same outfits – which make them outfit repeaters in my book. Only this time, I’m not complaining as it makes identification a lot easier. The biggest trick is to memorize which button on your keyboard corresponds to which security door. This is something which you will want to memorize quickly as if you lock security on an innocent neopian, you could find yourself with one ‘life’ lost. Lose three and it’s game over.
While you may at times accidentally press the wrong security door, you will only lose a ‘life’ if the door closes on an innocent customer. If you close a door without reason, you will lose a portion of your income. On the other end of the spectrum, if you don’t use your security doors at all, you will lose ‘lives’ as you watch the robbers speed away with your hard (or not so hard) earned cash.
As the game progresses, those cute little customers (who bring you money) and the amount of shady characters appearing will increase, in addition to an increase in appearance speed – nasty! Understandably, you may be worried that at times you will miss pressing the security door in time (and those shady characters when stealing, take a heck of a lot of money). Thus, as convenience would have it, there is an option to turn your hard earned cash into gold bars, which is unable to be stolen due to it’s extra heavy weight. However, these gold bars can only be made when you hold 100 neopoints in your hand. Press your space bar and viola! However, pressing your space bar when you do not have 100 neopoints will result in you losing a portion of your income.
I suggest focusing your attention on the doors and pressing the security buttons when the need arises. As the game speed increases, you may find that you will often lose lives when you quickly glance up to check if you have enough neopoints to convert to gold bars, only to find that that quick glance resulted in a quick robbery. Thus, I also recommend having a friend, family member or willing third party to stand/sit/whatever he/she fancies, next to you and make funny noises every time you have enough neopoints to convert to gold bars.
There isn’t much more to say about this game. It is very basic and straightforward, however, more often than not it’s the basic games that can quickly prove to become very tricky. Good luck!