Day One

After taxing my brain with SpaceChem a good bit today (more on that in a future post), I thought I'd give a new game a try. New to me anyway. Tropico 3 came out in October of 2009, so it's not really a new game. I'm cool with not playing new games though, since it allows me to not only allow the veritable cream to float to the top, but I get to skim that cream for 50 - 90% off of the launch day price.

I've not played Tropico 1,  2 or 3 before, so this is a brand new franchise to me. From what I've read, it's SimCity on a tropical island and you're the dictator. As a dictator, my hope is that if the advisers get ornery, you can simply have them shot.

Transit Adviser  "We have too many roads."

Me: "We have too many Transit Advisers."

Other than that, I don't know much about what to expect. I haven't played SimCity or anything like it for probably 10 years, so hopefully it's a fun little flashback with some entertaining updates. Onward to Tropico 3: Absolute Power!

90 minutes later

So, yeah. Pretty much SimCity on an island with some goofy voice acting to go along with it. I ran through the not very well done in-game tutorial and still found myself a bit lost when it was time to actually run my island. Despite my popularity rating falling to Bush 43 levels initially, I eventually poked around enough to figure things out. It was then pretty trivial to keep my popularity at about 61 or 62 percent, but I annoyingly couldn't move it past that, despite the time honored government technique of throwing gobs of money at it.

Probably the most annoying things in the game, after the kludgy camera mechanics, were the two in-game announcers. One is a horribly accented yes man, who babbles on about how everything you do is great. The other is "Betty Boom", the leader of the resistance movement. Her accent seemed much more authentic and her tongue-in-cheek jokes were funny for the first dozen of them. Both characters got old in a hurry and I hope for fans of the game, you can turn them off.

In the end, it's a tolerable enough game, despite the heavy handed use of the Latino themed Caribbean island gimmick. I just don't think I'm a big fan of the city building genre. I might come back to poke around in the game for the sake of this project, but I doubt there will be much more Tropico en mi futuro. Alas.

Games Played:

SpaceChem

Tropico 3

Achievements:

SpaceChem - Science is an Indoor Activity (Steam Summer Camp Ticket)

Tropico 3 - Whatever the one you get for doing the tutorial is (not integrated with Steam achievements)