I remember back in the dim days of the ancient past (somewhere in the early 90's). I heard about this guy, Phil Steinmeyer. It seems that he'd had the bright idea to take one of the great strategy games of all time - Railroad Tycoon - and make a sequel.
Now, this would have been noteworthy in and of itself; he had the audacity to try to improve on the work of Sid Meier? The information coming from Phil and his little company "Poptop" was . . . intriguing. The screenshots were great, and the game seemed to be the product of a labor of love. No corners were being cut, no effort spared to make it as good as possible. Railroad Tycoon II looked almost too good to be true.
When the game came out it was everything we'd hoped for. It is still one of the games that remains on my hard drive, and probably will never leave. Hardly a month goes by that I don't feel the urge to fire it up and try my hand at (railroad) Empire Building for a half-dozen hours or so.
But there's a problem with such an achievement: the curse of the one-hit wonder. The Buggles. Kajagoogoo. Flock of Seagulls. One magnificent opus, and then the horrible ignominy of creative failure. Would Phil be next?
The grapevine was abuzz that Poptop was gathering talent - highly skilled talent - for its next product. Despite flat-out begging for information, they were very secretive about it. There wasn't a whisper about what they were working on until finally, word leaked out. Poptop's next project was going to be (drum roll, please) . . . an ISLAND SIMULATION.
Huh? SimDictator?
Yes, the plan was that you would play El Jefe of a small tropical island. That's it. Manage it, or be overthrown. It honestly didn't sound like much of a game, and until now I have been pretty skeptical that it would be interesting, much less fun. Now that I've had a chance to tinker with an early beta, I've found it's really quite a product. Whether it will be a huge hit or not, I'm still not quite sure. About a million other sites on the web have also posted their beta previews, so we're presenting a boatload of screenshots and hopefully some insight that you haven't heard before.
The basic premise is exactly as stated. You are the president of Tropico, a generic tropical island set somewhere in the Caribbean. The time is vaguely the 1950's, and you stand betwixt the world's superpowers. Your goals (aside from any scenario-specific ones) are pretty simple: keep your people happy enough to stop them from throwing you out of office (or worse). Play the USA and the Soviets against each other, preferably for foreign aid cash. Meanwhile, make sure a decent 'retirement' account accumulates in a numbered Swiss account against the day of your resignation or coup d'etat - whichever comes first.
To accomplish this, you have the basic toolbox of every sim/builder game: you can build stuff or tear it down. What sets Tropico head and shoulders above other 'sim' games is the attention given to the people. Sure there are other
people-focused games out there. But this isn't just a household or even a neighborhood.
It won't be long in any scenario before you have an island full of hundreds of people, every single one modeled individually and rated for their happiness (with their educational levels, their job, and their housing, among other things). Each Tropican goes about their business, heading off to work and coming home when they're tired after a long day. Like real people, they don't like to have to walk a long way to their jobs. They hope that their coworkers like them. They sometimes want a drink, or to go out and have some fun. They get hungry, and get ticked off if they can't find a nearby place to eat.
If you don't keep them happy, they will take it out on you at the ballot box, if you're not careful. This personalization of the game makes it much more entertaining than other large scale simulations, where the population is little more than a statistically-modeled wave function. In Tropico, every one of them has a name, most have spouses and if the people are happy, they have children as well.
If it sounds complicated, it is. Phil and crew have done a remarkable job in the user interface, and made it conceivable (although not yet simple) to manage this barrel of monkeys. Advisors help you with the consequences of your edicts, and a significant suite of analysis tools - from exhaustive yearly almanacs to dozens of display filters - helps you keep a good handle on what's actually happening.
A much heavier emphasis is placed on managing the feelings of your people than on the typical guns/butter decisions of other sims. For example, you might have a burgeoning cigar-rolling industry going, but unless those people have a place to stay they're going to throw up tin shacks everywhere, and your city will look like, well, some raggedy third-world Caribbean island (and nobody really wants to take a relaxing vacation to Slumland).
You'll have to build apartments (or at least tenements) to draw these people out of downtown and to more 'controllable' housing. The problem is the subsistence wages you pay them at the cigar factory are likely not enough to afford the rent in the apartments. Lower the rent, and the buildings aren't self-sustaining.
Worse, at lower income levels you get a distinct increase in crime - a sure deterrent to above-mentioned tourists. The only way that you can lower crime is more police, which in the Tropican tradition are somewhat heavy-handed in their administration of the law. They can be almost as bad as the crime. Want to create a tourist haven away from the filth of your city? You'll find that you have to pay the staff disproportionate salaries to get them to walk all the way out from town.
Like all of the better 'sim' games, gameplay revolves around balancing all of these vicious circles. And the examples above are merely the economic ones. Each Tropican (or immigrants if you are lucky) has varying priorities as regards religion, free time, job, home, etc. Address these needs and you'll be president for life.
That is, unless the revolutionaries show up. Did I forget to mention? Every tropical island has revolutionaries, and yours is no exception. Every Tropican also has a set of political beliefs, and they are much happier with you when you fulfill their expectation of how the place should be run. Too much industry ticks off the environmentalists, too few churches incite the faithful. Push any faction too far and they clap on their red berets - once you see them wandering around your towns, you'd better have a decent cadre of soldiers, or defenestration is the best you can hope for.
If you've kissed up to one or the other superpower, your unhappy people might get the crazy notion that they can appeal to that superpower to replace you! The USA or the USSR, it doesn't matter. You might get the exploding cigar treatment or perhaps the Russian Flu (ala Brezhnev, Andropov, ad infinitum) signaling a sudden change of administration for the island of Tropico.
All of this plays out on some of the most beautiful scenery ever seen on a monitor. This definitely raises the bar for all other games - not just of this genre, but all of them. Poptop is famous for the amazing, fully 3D
rotate-able buildings, world, and animations in Railroad Tycoon II. They took this experience and quite literally went (coco)nuts in Tropico. [sorry!]
At the closest zoom level (not much for playability, but it looks nice) you feel you can reach out and touch the potted plants hanging from the railings of the President's mansion. The fisherman's wharf almost smells of the sea, its rusted tin corrugated roof and worn, water-swollen siding baking in the tropical heat. Lockheed Constellations zoom into the airport and taxi to a stop before disgorging wealthy vacationers to spend money in your casinos and hotels.
Of course, it's not just the buildings that get the quality treatment. The people each wear outfits appropriate to their trade: a teamster's sweaty work shirt just covers the paunch that overlaps his beltline. Cabaret girls might want to change into something a little more conservative than their work uniform, since it's likely to get them sunburned in all sorts of tender places.
I've always been a strong advocate of quality music in games. Obvious or subtle, the music can set the mood and tone of an entire game. If the theme is jarring, even a good game will suffer drastically - perhaps even critically - from the discord between the game and the musical background. Fortunately, there are no such worries here. The songs of Tropico were produced by LMS Records
