Political Machine beta released

Let the games begin

Published on April 14, 2004 By Draginol In Politics

If you have Drengin.net (www.drengin.net) you can now download the beta of The Political Machine.

The Political Machine is a strategy game in which you run for President of the United States. Its home page is www.politicalmachine.com.

Let us know what you think if you've got it here!

Comments (Page 1)

JonPaul

on Apr 14, 2004

The game will not even run -- I have DirectX 9.0b and am running under Windows XP. My computer is generally decent (2.4 ghz, 256 DDRAM, 64 mb graphics card, etc...)

Kevin the Kitten

on Apr 14, 2004

How long did you give it? I have a blank screen for around 25 seconds with only a cursor before the game gets going. I'm havinf fun trying it out. Is there a special forum for submitting bug reports?

mormegil

on Apr 14, 2004

JonPaul, Try and load it agin and give it a bit to generate the Textures, if it still dose not come up at all, please let us know, more details, What video Card are you running, etc.
PS. You should only get the long load time the first time you launch.

Draginol

on Apr 14, 2004

JonPaul, what happens when you try to run it? The first time you run it it has to generate all the textures.

mormegil

on Apr 14, 2004

Keven, I am sure we will have a dedicate place to repost bugs soon, but in the meantime, if you post them here they will be read.

OpusCroakus

on Apr 14, 2004

Mine runs, but after week 2 got a crash to desktop. WinXP SP1, DX 9.0b, GeForce 3, latest drivers (56.72). Oh, Brad, someone may want to look at the news server... A couple of the game forums got HUUUUGE numbers of posts at 5:45 this evening.

KEmperor

on Apr 14, 2004

Mine runs, albeit it seems freeze up for a bit sometimes when i fly to another state or something. Also, the main problem is that the music doesn't play correctly. I get a series of pops and static noises. I have DirectX 9.0b, and I even redownloaded it to make sure.

Draginol

on Apr 14, 2004

We're going to need hardware configuration.

We haven't had any problems with sound on any of our test machines.

Zoomba

on Apr 14, 2004

I'm really enjoying it so far. Played 1.5 games (second one crashed out of nowhere around the middle of the game). Both times I played dem and was able to beat Bush pretty solidly... I'm going to try on increasing difficulty to see how the AI changes tactics. On cakewalk and easy the AI ignored the large electoral states and as soon as I establised more than a 5% lead, he abandons the state completely... In neither game so far did it even try to fight for CA... and I was able to take Bush's home state of Texas without any contest... once again I think this is a difficulty setting... but either way, easy and cakewalk are TOO easy right now.

Initial Thoughts:
-I love the presentation style of the game, very nice, clean and easy to look at
-It's pretty easy to navigate through the menus
-The way you do the end-of-race election result thing is really cool, perhaps changing it a little to make it look like CNN or another major news channel would fit more in with the theme and style you're going for.
-Why do I have a running mate? will he be a second piece on the map to campaign around?
-Do special interests do anything currently? I buy them, but I'm not exactly sure what they do, if anything.

Basically I think this is shaping up to be a really great, but I have to agree with your previous post Brad about how there needs to be a lot more clear feedback on what choices you make affect, and what exactly your opponent is doing.

Oh, will the two candidates ever be able to participate in a debate at all?

-Z

mittens

on Apr 14, 2004

Yeah, I get the occasional freeze throughout the game that lasts for about 4-5 seconds, but it only occurs once every 15-20 minutes or so. The game also seems to crash half-way through my campaign. I've not been able to get fully through a campaign yet.

Glad to hear there's a windowed-mode though, that makes me indefinately happy.

Riahon

on Apr 14, 2004

I've tried running it a few times, I even rebooted. Each time I get a black screen with an orange cursor for about 20 seconds, then it shuts down and I'm back at my desktop.

I have a fairly new machine also. My machine is running Windows XP. It has the following: 2600+ AMD Athlon XP, 512mb & S3 ProSavage8

mittens

on Apr 14, 2004

Trying to select the "Options" menu in the game seems to just take me to the main menu, and quits out of the current game I'm in. Is that normal for the beta?

Genghis Hank

on Apr 14, 2004

Looks like it's going to be a great game!

Found a couple of problems:

The game allows you to play as the same person as the computer. I just started a game with George W against George W. The computer player used some of my stamina, took (and raised) money from my campain, and gave me specials that he took. Also, the board started turning blue in every state that didn't receive a visit from either player each turn. I guess the country thinks one GW Bush is enough...

I also am having about a 50% crash to desktop problem. PIII933 Win2K 384MB RAM, 64MB GForce2

Lotherius

on Apr 14, 2004

It runs for me, and I have sound. But like one previous poster, if I attempt to click on Options once in the game, I get booted out to the main menu. I'm running XP Pro SP1, 512MB Ram, AMD XP 3200+, nForce2 chipset, Geforce MX440-SE (the weak link). It looks fine otherwise.

Lotherius

on Apr 15, 2004

Okay, managed to stay away from the "options" screen. I did manage to win my first game.

First take: Really lacking in depth. Really it's a matter of click around and campaign more than your opponent, while remembering to raise funds while in the rich states so you don't end up spending two turns raising campaign funds in poor states so you can afford airfare out. There's very little strategy, at least on the 2cd up difficulty, to it. Take the key battleground states: Texas, New York, California, Florida, and make sure you get at least most of the rest of the northeast, and you'll win. Taking these states seemed almost too easy, and there was almost no interaction with the game in the sense of responding to what your opponent does. In fact, I didn't even pay attantion to what his campaign was - if a state went red, I went there and campaigned and maybe bought a couple of ads, and that's it.

Finally, when I was looking at the results from winning the election, another application decided it was the perfect time to steal focus (even though I have tweakui set to prevent apps stealing focus, they still do so) and brought up an alert window. This yanked me out of Political Machine and to my desktop. When I tried to switch back to Political Machine, I got a black box covering a portion of my window, and the music resumed. It never actually went fully back to the game - I was stuck with the black box. I finally had to kill the process with task manager.

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