Political Machine 2008
Most game companies love to complain that piracy will be the death of the gaming industry, even though piracy has always existed in the background. Still these companies pile artificial limitations and DRM on their titles making them impossible to install and play, even for a lot of people who paid money for the game. Then on the other hand you have companies like Stardock who don’t believe in piracy protection and sell copies like crazy. Why? Because their games are easy to purchase, install and frankly they are designed for people who love games, not people who can’t afford to buy games after building a monster PC with dueling video cards.
And speaking of easy distribution I picked up a copy of Political Machine 2008 from Impulse, the Stardock equivalent of Steam (although still not quite as good). I was a huge fan of the original Political Machine and given how sucked into politics I am this year I really couldn’t help myself. And just like the original, this game involves managing a presidential campaign from start to election day in hopes that your Democratic or Republican candidate will make their way to the white house.
Even before you start you have some interesting options, such as the ability to create your candidate with a 3d bobble head editor and select strengths, weaknesses and the talking points your candidate is passionate about. All this really affects your game. For example a candidate who is great at fund raising will always have some extra cash for TV commercials and building campaign headquarters. On the other hand vigorous candidates can tirelessly travel the nation making talk show appearances and giving speeches. In my case I created Tony Stark, a hawkish Democrat who believes in alternate fuels, national security and booze fueled fund raising events.
Once you start the game you will find it to be wonderfully abstract yet as specific as you could want. Each turn you get a certain amount of actions depending on your candidates endurance level. This can be spent giving speeches, creating ads, raising funds and doing all the stuff you would expect a politician to do (minus the sex scandals). Along the way you pick up key endorsements that boost your credibility, celebrity supporters and crafty operatives that make you look good while slandering the opposition. Still if you want to take your game to the next level there is a huge wealth of poling data available to the player on what talking points matter in what states and how you are doing in both popular vote and awareness. And awareness is the name of the game… even if voters disagree with your politics they will always vote for you if they have never heard of the other guy. This means that the best way to win the game is to hit the American public hard with a media savvy campaign where the candidate mostly talks about the things he is famous for. For example an inexperienced player can wing it traveling from state to state talking about lowering fuel costs but when Al Gore makes a TV ad about the environment it turns heads all over.
While I do enjoy the game a lot I think it could have been better. For one many candidates lack opinions on the issues and don’t seem like the best representation of their real life counterpart. Also the games website is full of political discussion and news, if they had worked this into the games start window they would have the perfect portal for campaign enthusiasts. Either way it’s a cheap game with no DRM and frequent updates, so if you love politics, strategy games and bobble heads then there is no excuse not to pick this one up.