Political Machine
OK, so I plunked down $20 to get the hottest game on the market: Political Machine.
First things first ... the game is so worth it. If there's a political junkie without it, you hereby lose the title of political junkie. Its entertaining, more than accurate. The biases are a bit predictable, making it very difficult for me to elect John Silber President while running as a conservative Massachusetts Democrat. I haven't even tried my luck at creating a William Proxmire, although I did manage to get the one African American Dem from Wyoming to whomp David Duke.
I've been playing it in Campaign Mode, which allows you to pick a candidate, and the game then progresses up the food chain with more and more difficult candidates to run against. So Bill Clinton starts off running against Condi Rice and whomps her. But I stall about halfway up the food chain, finding Teddy Roosevelt particularly difficult to beat (I'm 0-fer-2). The process also moves up the food chain of difficulty. I began in one of the Easy modes, but now I'm up towards one of the Sadistic levels of difficulty.
I've vowed to spend any free time today towards plotting strategy. TR has outspent me like Malcolm Forbes, for crissakes, and snatches up a lot of endorsements early on. This puts me on my heels as I usually try and nab the Chamber of Commerce and Foriegn Affairs endorsements early on, with the Environmental endorsement if I need more safety in claiming the West Coast. Problem with TR is that he cuts into my Northeast base rather hard. I won NY the first time I played, didn't try in the second. But in both tries, I really got swamped in the smaller NE states that I normally relied on to be isolated from a GOP attack. That SOB Kerry hasn't been much of a help by way of a running mate. Previous strategy was to pick one of the New York candidates or Kerry to put a death grip on the entire region for me. Doesn't work with TR, though. So I'm in search of a new strategy, possibly trying a more southern approach tonight.
On the GOP side, I have to marvel at how easy the first two rounds were with W. as my candidate. I think I won about 45 or more states each time. But after giving up on the above, I lost to Al Gore, believe it or not. And I think that's only the 4th of the 10 candidates (as opposed to TR being #5 on the list for the flip side of the game). I'm not sure whether to blame my losing streak against TR on this, or that the issue importance seemed to have changed a bit too drastically for my normal strategy to work. But in any event, California made the difference, it was THAT close.