From: grantham@beirut.berkeley.edu (Jon Grantham)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games
Subject: Power Politics
Date: 23 Nov 1992 13:36:40 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley Math. Department.
NNTP-Posting-Host: beirut.berkeley.edu

I bought Power Politics, an election simulation game for Windows, Saturday.
In many ways, it reminds me of the old CGA President Elect game.  You run
the campaign of a candidate in the US Presidential General Election.  You
can run a Democrat, Republican or Independent.  As an example, the Independents
available are H. Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, David Duke, John Anderson, Pat
Robertson, Jerry Brown, Eugene McCarthy, George Wallace, Jesse Jackson, Barry
Commoner, John Connally, Alexander Haig, Geraldine Ferraro & Lyndon LaRouche.
Obviously, not all of these are Independents, and not all Independents are
here.  I guess this is just what the author considered interesting.  You can
also define your own custom candidates, although they won't have the neat-o
BMP picture that comes with the standard candidates (I stole the Tsongas BMP
& am using it as my Windows background).

Once you decide who the candidates
& their Veeps are going to be, you start the campaign.  Interestly enough,
James "Why am I here?" Stockdale isn't a choice for the Independent Veep.  It
looks like this was written a couple of months before the election.  You
have the option for the Independent, if computer controlled, to drop out of
the race at some point.  As a further reflection of when this was written,
the independent candidate can't re-enter at the last minute.

As you might expect, some, any or none of the candidates can be human
controlled, the others computer controlled.  You then do the campaign 
day-to-day for 4-12 weeks (a nice feature is the ability to just start the
election when you get sick of the campaign).  You decide where to spend money,
campaign, hold press conferences, rest & fund raise, day-by-day, state-by-
state & even city-by-city.  The level of detail is nice, but you can see why
you might want to use the feature I mentioned above.  You can debate one or
both of your opponents, engage in dirty tricks, run ads both positive &
negative, and consults zillions of different polls.  Then, on election day,
you sit back and watch the returns come in, and if necessary, the vote
in the House of Representatives.

All in all, I find the game very entertaining & highly addictive.  I've been
running myself as a 3rd party candidate (Grantham-Tsongas in '92!) with the
goal of capturing enough Pacific states to throw the Clinton-Bush election into
the House (I've done it once).  

Despite the fact that I enjoy this game a lot, I have some problems with it.
Some of these I'd characterize as bugs.  If you select certain candidates in
SVGA mode, the program crashes.  (Barry Commoner & John Anderson).  To fix
this, you have to copy commonr2.bmp to commonr8.bmp & andersn2.bmp to
andersn8.bmp.  They just forgot to supply 256-color bitmaps for these
candidates.  Not a major problem, once fixed, but sort of unprofessional.
You set destinations at the beginning of the week for Monday to Sunday.  If
you want to change your destination for the next day from your original plan,
you can do that.  If you try to change your destination on Sunday, since you
haven't set one already for the next day, the program crashes.
Perhaps the most annoying bug is that the program seems to randomize the
stances you take as a custom candidate.  I entered myself as right wing on
Social Security; it made me a liberal.  I'm using Version 1.04 of the program;
I'm tempted to call Cineplay Interactive & see if they have patches.

Another problem I have is the size -- 7 megs..  That seems to me a bit
execssive.  I've heard people say that the 640K barrier had the advantage of
making programmers code efficiently...maybe this is true.  Maybe every KB
was necessary, on the other hand.  The inability to enter the race at a late
date makes it harder to simulate Perot.  The fact that this is a 1992
campaign makes the historical simulations less accurate.  I wish the program
let you supply your own BMPs for custom candidates.  The interface is generally
good, but somewhat annoying at times...there aren't always keyboard shortcuts,
making all of the selections can be cumbersome...  The program has manual
look-up copy protection, which is annoying.  There's no way to save the results
to look at later...oh, and you can only save the campaign at the end of the
week.

All in all, I'm happy with the game, but it could have used a little bit of
playtesting.

Jon