Political Machine 2008 | 
| From: Stardock
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $12.98
You Save: $7.01 (35%)
New (12) Used (3) from $8.50
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 4238
Format: Cd-rom
Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows Xp
Genre: artificial_life_simulation_games
ESRB: Everyone 10+
Media: CD-ROM
Operating System: Windows Vista
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 1.5
MPN: 708192010660
Model: 708192010660
UPC: 708192010660
EAN: 0708192010660
ASIN: B0018XYGB2
Release Date: June 16, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Very Good Game for the High IQ Crowd June 23, 2008
Anandasubramanian C. Pranat
12 out of 16 found this review helpful
I never thought companies would make games for the 120+ IQ crowd anymore.
Well, i was wrong. Stardock has made a good, solid game with good graphics that mimics the real world to a large extent.
This edition is a huge improvement on the 2004 version in following areas:
1. AI is stronger and somehow McCain starts with a 20 point lead (which is surprising).
2. The sheer availability of radical choices like money making, spending, raising awareness is sharpened.
3. The graphics are colorful and great, yet cool on eyes.
What's Bad :
1. Installation of game requires upgrading to Impulse (a new download engine). This replaces the stardock control panel and stardock is quiet on Impulse as replacement of Stardock Control Panel.
2. The earlier version is not uninstalled when you install this version. Yes, i agree this is a new game. But still...
3. No Upgrade path. You pay retail at FULL price. Price is very low: $19.99 for digital download. But still if stardock could give us $5 off for upgrading, then it would be good.
Best game of its kind out there--excellent UI, graphics and features September 4, 2008
Ben D. Schaechter (New York, NY United States)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
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!
 All in all it's worth the 20 bones... learn demographics August 4, 2008
zyphlus (concord, ca USA)
8 out of 12 found this review helpful
Political Machine 2008 review
Well the new election is coming up and I was eagerly awaited the updated Political Machine 2008 release (PM08.)
The Good:
First, PM08 is easy to jump right into and start playing. It is more intuitive than PM04. The graphics are upgraded and cool. You can use the extensive controls to design your own bobble head to play with. I made an evil DNC hipster guy w/ multiple piercings and a GOP dominatrix with a cane. New 121 week campaign is awesome.
The Bad:
PM08 is not as hard as PM04. It might be the issues are more neutral this time, but I found, that on the Masochistic setting I had no problem beating the machine. It may just be my assumptions about the character settings that serve me so well. The AI is weak and fails to fully respond to my specific attacks. On the other hand, maybe I'm Karl Rove and Lee Atwater hybrid and don't know it. It does crash in Vista 64 every about 8-10 hours. Sometimes it is hard to find specific characters on a state in order to "Fix" them this isn't a big problem in short campaign but if your running 20-30 ads in California and have 3-4 Smear Merchants in state finding the enemy Definer is difficult.
The Ugly politics of it all.
Now for an example screwed up of player data. Money (wealth) is all screwed up. Starting with the richest John Kerry (7 rating) who doesn't count since Theresa doesn't let him touch it.
Mitt Romney (6 rating) worth 300-500 million should be getting a 10 but gets only a 6.
Cheney (7 rating) worth $90-110 million should be 9
Bush (8 rating) is worth $15-25 million should be 6
Obama (6 rating) is worth around $2 million including the corrupt Chicago land deals
McCain (6 rating) worth $25-40 million should be 6
Bill Clinton (6 rating) worth about $35 million is about right.
Hillary Clinton (8 rating) huh? worth the same, unless a divorcee came through.
John Edwards (6 rating) worth about $30 to 60 million. Should be 7.
So the numbers are all screwed up Obama only gets a 7 for fund raising. Bill Clinton rightfully gets a 9 and W gets a deserved proper 8. Obama should have a 2-3 for money and a 10 for fund razing. The polls are too kind to the GOP on Iraq. In the same vain they are far to kind to the DNP on High Gas Prices. I could go on.
This is really a great tool for learning demographics. Click on those states and learn the make-up of the people that live there. All in all it's worth the 20 bones.
Great for CNN junkies but slapped together at the last minute September 9, 2008
Henry Jenkins (Kirkland, WA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 Not as good as the last one August 24, 2008
Glenn (Texas)
0 out of 8 found this review helpful
This game has great graphics, but honestly I enjoyed the 2004 version of Political Machine better.
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