I'm a very goal driven person. It's not that I dislike freeform, but I always do better when I have a clear, measurable way of monitoring my success. Even in games, I don't often go exploring unless I have a specific goal in mind (i.e. discover all the new places in this section of the map, find the super laser that makes this ten times easier, find the generic hidden items, etc.). For a non-video game example, I decided that having 20 pictures of myself on Facebook after 3 years of college was unacceptable. So I've been on a quest to get to 100 photos before the start of MTSU's school year. And it's gone very well. For those who don't facebook stalk me, you'll see I have a respectable 81 photos tagged of me now (of course, it helps that I have a new, awesome digital camera). However, the point is that I'm disappointed with the English Muffin Power Hour.
Don't get me wrong, I've made some good content updates and it's been much better visited and updated than my first foray into the blogosphere. But I've made less than a dozen posts this year and it's August (Tempus Fugit). So I'm going to write a post every day until I reach last year's total of 42. I can't gaurantee that every update will be a 500 word opus of hilarious insights that you're used to. But done is better than perfect. What's more, I promise that none of the updates will be "Today's update is that I promise to update the blog tomorrow." With that in mind, let's jump into today's update: Tropico.
Holy crap! I'm actually including pictures of what I'm talking about!
I've already talked a little bit about Tropico. It's a game I saw a friend play in 6th grade and then promptly never thought of it until a few weeks ago. I read a headline that said there was a Tropico 3 coming out this fall (it was a very slow news day) and nostalgic memories of the game I saw for maybe 10 minutes came rushing back (did I ever mention I have a very weird memory? I can remember ten minutes of a game from ten years ago but not where I left my allergy medicine.). And then I stumbled on "Tropico Reloaded" on Steam the other day. Before I go on, Steam is a digital distribution store for PC games. Instead of buying a hard copy of a game at a store, you pay for the download off Steam and can usually save a lot of money (because unlike game stores, Steam actually has sales). But I digress. The point is I saw that Tropico, its bland expansion pack, and forgettable sequel were available for a paltry $15. So I decided to try my hand at being a Carribean overlord.
Behold! Hunteria in all its randomly generated glory!
Let's start with what I like about the game. For starters, it has a great character creator. For starters, the game is a civilization/management type game, so any sort of character customization is great. But the real gem is that you get to pick your dictator's background, such as Left-Wing Author (I always knew Al Franken wanted to rule Cuba), General (I am a modern major general), Fortunate Son (It ain't me! It ain't me! I ain't no senator's son!) and several others. And then you pick your rise to power, which ranges from lame democratic process to awesome violent rebellion/military coup. And after that you pick two virtues and two vices for your character. So it takes what's normally a faceless, soulless role and makes it into a very personal one.
Unfortunately, that also leads me to the first major flaw. Every trait you pick influences the stats your dictator has. This game is nothing if not stat crazy. Unfortunately, the stats aren't particularly well-balanced. So rather than design a character that sounds interesting, it's better to design one that can win the game easily.
Back to the positives, Tropico's motto is "You Rule" because of the absurd levels of control the game gives you over your island. You can make it a tourists' paradise, a Marxist wonderland, or a soulless industrial powerhouse. Unfortunately, this absurd level of power is the game's big weakness. It's full tag should read "You Rule... Because The People Will Starve If You Don't Tell Them Exactly What To Do".
The game seems to make place in a bizzarre world of micromanagement where you can only control the least interesting parts of the world. All buildings on the island are government owned and operated, even if you're a capitalist. That means it's up to you to set wages and rent and build houses and businesses. But here's the kicker: you don't control where people work or what they do when they work. This wouldn't be a problem if the AI wasn't made of Liquid Stupid. I suffered far too many economic collapses because dockworkers wouldn't take goods from one end of the pier to another. I later found out that this was because my workers were exhausting themselves moving from their homes to their work. But there's nothing I can do about that. If I build more homes, I can't control who moves in there and I can't do much to make the commute easier (I can build dirt roads for the workers to ignore). And of course, an absurdly huge part of the game is moving goods from where they're grown to where they're manufactured to where they're sold. But of course that requires legions of teamsters whose primary goal is to tick me off by exhausting themselves walking and only carrying one thing in a month of work.
In fairness, the game is good with its realism in regard to fatigue and the average price for workers going up over time. Unfortunately, the goods you sell don't go up at nearly the same rate, so it inevitably leads to a recession. Also, it's impossible to tax the population so you can't get the extra income back.
In summary, Tropico was a cool idea with simply terrible execution.
