Video Games : Political Machine 2008

In association with Amazon.com
  

from: Stardock

: Political Machine 2008
variant image variant image variant image
Amazon.com's Price: $19.99
Prices subject to change.



Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
More Information


This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
Binding: CD-ROM
Brand: Stardock
EAN: 0708192010660
ESRB Age Rating: Everyone 10+
Format: CD-ROM
Label: Stardock
Manufacturer: Stardock
Model: 708192010660
Publisher: Stardock
Release Date: June 16, 2008
Sales Rank: 4212
Studio: Stardock



Related Items:

Editorial Review:

Product Description:
The Political Machine 2008 puts players in control of the 2008 presidential campaign. Play as the campaign manager for a host of candidates including Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, historical candidates or design one from scratch. Players then choose their campaign battlegrounds and are off on the campaign trail to face a host of challenges including fundraising, talk show appearances, hiring spin doctors and winning endorsements. The game is won on Election Day by the player who gets the necessary electoral votes to become President. The Political Machine is both a single and a multiplayer game - players can either compete against the computer or against others online.

The Political Machine is a strategy game that takes the real world mechanics of political campaigning and uses it to create an award-winning strategy game. Raise money, hire spin-doctors, win the endorsements of important groups, go on TV interviews, take out ads, fight off smear merchants and much more in your quest to win the 270 electoral votes you need to get into the white house.
Your opponents can be controlled either by human players over the Internet or by a diabolical computer AI designed by Stardock's renowned artificial intelligence team. With multiple maps and scenarios to choose from, a candidate editor and much more, The Poliltical Machine is not just a timely bit of fun during the campaign season but a strategy game that will stand the test of time.



Customer Reviews
Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Loved it!
This is my first time purchasing a title from this series, and I have to say that I loved it! If you enjoy politics, you will love this game!

Can you get your favorite candidate (even if they did not make the general election) win the presidency? I will not say that it is an overly hard game if you are familiar with politics and you are willing to read the instruction booklet, but it is extremely fun, and the difficulty settings will let you make it as hard or easy as you like.

Enjoy!


Rating: 1 out of 5 stars - Easily forgettable
I had played the original game from 2004, and so I felt obligated to try this one out.

Firstly, maybe they thought this was a good idea, but now instead of cartoon characters of the presidential candidates, they're replaced with what can only generously be called caricature 'likeness' bobble-heads that look virtually nothing like who they're supposed to be.

Off to go campaigning, you realize absolutely nothing has changed from the original's game engine. The only new additions I found were the ability to build two new buildings in each state (forgot their names) to build up political capital and political experience, which can buy political agents or gain endorsements. New issues have been added to reflect the 2008 season.

Everything else is exactly the same.

Once you've played this game or the 2004 edition once, you've pretty much played all you can play it.

The issues are almost haphazardly aligned and shifted mid-game, to a point where you could make a TV ad in a state stating your opposition to high gas prices, only to a few weeks later start to lose awareness there because all of a sudden they SUPPORT high gas prices. Not only is this clear insanity/stupidity since NO ONE supports high gas prices these days save for the occasional one or two out of ten people or more.

In the end issues don't even matter; all your speeches and ads can be about supporting the economy or supporting the environment or some other PC universal BS issue that no one could possibly oppose without being declared legally insane by the public and you'll never need to become a "divider".

Interviews consist basically of answering true to your base. That is, if you're a Republican, you answer a question with the most insanely wrong answer that is most insensitive and stupid (such as sending military forces to the US-Mexico border, being gung-ho about terrorism, thinking gay marriage is "icky"), whereas if you're a Democrat, you answer a question with the most insanely wrong answer that is most hippie-liberal politically correct with peace love and flowers for all. If you don't head primarily one way, you lose the audience and risk damage to your national awareness.

The campaign starts off easily, and rather than gradually increase the difficulty, it instead keeps the gameplay AI exactly the same, with the only difficulty being that suddenly your state awareness is cut back, while your opponent's stays the same.

This means that in one level in a state at the start of the game, you and your opponent can be 50-50 in the polls, and several levels later, at the very beginning, for no reason, you're down to 39%-50%

And working to build up awareness percentages in the DOUBLE digits is almost completely impossible. You're guaranteed to lose all the states unless you gain all the endorsements available and spend all your money on ads and campaign buildings.


In that way, it thinks it is being more difficult with each level, when really it's only rigging the game against you, to a point where succeeding to the next level is impossible unless you cheat.


Then there's bias: Yes, even this game has bias. As much as they may deny it or make it subtle, it's there: Republican issues and Republican endorsements are more effective on neutral states than Democratic issues and endorsements.

For example: the Gun Lobby endorsement, a Republican endorsement, gives you a highly noticeable boost in almost every southern state from Florida to Texas. The Women's Lobby endorsement, a Democratic endorsement, gives you almost no boost anywhere but California, which is already heavily Democratic to begin with.

This would seemingly not be of such concern since Republicans can get Democratic endorsements and such, except for the fact that an opposite-party endorsement costs MORE political experience points. Example: if you're a Democrat with 10 experience points, you can afford a Democratic endorsement for 10 points, but a Republican endorsement costs 13 points for you, whereas it costs 10 for your opponent, and Democratic endorsements cost 13 for him/her.




Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Political Machine 2008 - Decent Strategy Title
Much like the earlier Political Machine title, the 2008 is a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of political campaigning. Updated for the 2008 race with cartoony mini avatars of Sens. McCain, Obama, Clinton and other major primary candidates, the game is a decent strategy title but lacks the depth needed to keep you playing past your bedtime. Production was rushed to get the title on shelves during the election season, and that is apparent in the many misspellings and grammatical errors. Graphics are good - I personally loved their take on real-life figures like Larry King, Bill O'Reilly and Stephen Colbert - yet, underneath it all, gameplay largely consists of zig-zagging around the map raising your candidate's awareness and manipulating percentages. After just one or two campaigns, I had a technique for winning every time. All in all though, for its price, it is a decent strategy game that offers a good value, and it would be particularly fitting as a gift for the political junkie in your family.


Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Great for CNN junkies but slapped together at the last minute

As a fan of the political game genre going back to the Doonsbury election simulator of the mid-90s I've been excited to try a new one every four years and the experience always feels fairly fresh by that time. Over the last two months I've gotten a lot of replay value out of this one and there are still goals I'm setting for myself (winning is one thing, sweeping all 50 states is another.) The game has a nice range of candidates - from frontrunners like Obama, McCain, Hillary and Romney, to also rans like Ron Paul and Bill Richardson, to former presidents like Lyndon Baines Johnson and Teddy Roosevelt) and makes it easy to design more, who look and act fairly close to how you'd pictured them. The scenarios do provide some fun variation (like running during the civil war on a platform of pro slavery, squatters rights and opposing the transatlantic railroad, or running on an alien planet in favor of banning non-violent television and breaking away from the federation.) The game play is simple enough to be very accessible while still requiring strategy to really master. (In what order should you advertise heavily, gather an army of fund raisers, build up credibility with The Federal Tax Payers Union and the Christian Coalition, and hire political operatives like Spin Doctors and Smear Merchants? Some strategies do work better than others.) The game even has code that's easy to hack so you could, in theory, make Al Gore really charismatic or give John McCain the energy of a young pup by playing with the Program Files.

That said, the game is far from perfect and has some issues, some really annoying and some fairly nit picky. The worst is a fairly notorious set of bugs. Not only does the game occasionally crash and lose your progress but it has some rather unfathomable problems (for some reason telling voters you favor high gas prices is a good thing, but it's far more effective if you do it with speeches than TV ads.) Sloppy. One of my biggest beefs is also that there's one side of every issue that will make you more popular than its opposite, and its the same side in every state. For example, I understand that opposing the War in Iraq would make you more popular in Massachusetts, but would it really make you more popular in Alabama, too? Why isn't there a single issue in which one side or the other seems to be the correct answer? I also can't decide what I think about the fact that so many of the political issues don't seem political. Voters apparently really like a politician that favors Improving the Economy, for example. And alternative energy. They like alternative energy. But every politician in every party favors those things. Is the game calling voters dumb for responding to platitudes over substance, and if so, are they right?

I also have minor nitpicks like the fact that FDR is programmed into the code but was apparently left unfinished and therefore can't be unlocked without altering the source. When you do unlock him he acts like FDR but he's identical to Mitt Romney. Just uses the same icon. Strange.

Anyway, this game would have been perfect if they'd just laid more of the groundwork for it more solidly before the last minute, and then just tweaked some of the specifics to make it seem ripped from the headlines. They could have made high gas prices one of the core issues of the election rather than universal health care (which they're spot on with) but simply weighted them in relative importance long after both were programmed into the game (which, judging from the bizarre bugs, they probably didn't.) Still, this all seems like nitpicking because for a political junky like me it's full of fun stuff to play around with and gives you a way to contemplate the political scene even on a slow news cycle day.


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Best game of its kind out there--excellent UI, graphics and features
I bought this game and fully expected it to be like other political turn-based games: weak, unexciting, unchallenging. Boy, I was wrong.

You get to creae a candidate, their looks, their clothes. Then , you choose which of 20 characteristics they are strong in: charisma, experience, looks,etc. You can play alone or aginst friends. Each candidate participates in a week by week turn-based campaign of 41 weeks.

Each turn, a candidate can do 1 or more of the following in each state:

1. Travel there or have a political operative or VP fly there
2. Build campaign headquarters, consulting centers, or outreach centers
3. Create ongoing TV, radio, or newspaper ads
4 Make speeches for a given issue
5. Hold fund-raising activities

In addition, after acquiring political clout one can hire operatives of all kind: spin doctors, initimidators, money men, webmasters, smear artists,etc. Most can be sent to specific states and moved.

One can also seek the endorsement of few dozen groups ranging from NRA, Unions to minority groups.

I find the game fascinating. The graphics can be adjusted all the way up to 1080. No bugs found yet at all.

Challenging since playing alone..you are matched with an opponent and starts with beginners and after each victory, the opponents get tougher and tougher.

The great part is the map of US can be viewed several ways: by # of elecoralvotes, party affiliation, etc.

In addition, there is a weekly summary screen after each turn showing popular vote, electoral votes (projected), newsflashes. Occasionally, you will also be asked to appear on talk shows!

The conclusion,when the map lights up state by state either reed or blue is awesome. Also, win or lose..you receive an anaysis explaining your loss or victory, exit polls, etc.

I highly recommend this game to anyone interested in politics, elections, or just having fun. This game, while exceptionl, coudl have its heuristics enahnecd even further to be quite complex.

Enjoy! Best $20 I ever spent!


see more


More Information
Browse for similar items by category:

 

HOME

Free Ajax Scripts - Mortgages - Wester Union - Loans - Loans