Frogboy

Polls are interesting things but statistical analysis is my thing. And based on our models in The Political Machine, Kerry is going to squeak out a victory in November barring a sudden change in events. But the Florida of 2004 may be where you least expect it - Iowa. Ohio and Iowa are going to be the key states this time. But it is Iowa that people should be keeping an eye on even more so than Ohio or Florida. It has a relatively low population which creates all kinds of opport

If you are interested in game development, here is an inside scoop on how The Political Machine was made and what went right and wrong on it. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041011/wardell_01.shtml

The official 1.02 patch is now available for download from Ubisoft (for CD orders) or via Stardock Central if you preordered or have TotalGaming.net from Stardock. If you have previously had Safedisc issues and contacted [email protected] for those, please followup on those again now. T

This week we expect to release v1.02 of The Political Machine which improves support for Windows 98 systems and makes some gameplay tweaks with regards to the endorsement system (it'll be slightly harder for Republicans to get liberal endorsements and vice versa). But what about after the election? Stardock plans to continue to provide new updates to The Political Machine in various forms. One area we plan to try to update the game regularly are on the issues. We don't wan

First off, sorry you're running into such a problem. However, given that there aren't other reports of this, could you see how the assertion that we're trying to "rip you off" might be a bit offensive to us? If you want help, try not treating us as if we're out to get you or something. Next, contact Ubi Soft. The back of the manual has the official support information. It would also help to know a little bit about your computer. Since the game doesn't have this pro

We're putting the final tweaks on v1.02 of The Political Machine. Amongst the tweaks and changes come in the endorsement area. Based on player feedback, we've decided to make conservative special interest groups harder to win the support of if you're a Democrat and vice versa if you're a Republican with the liberal special interest groups. Most of our energy has been trying to make sure the game works on the widest variety of hardware. The game should run fine on p

We intentionally don't have such big random events because we feared it would make people feel they're at the mercy of blind luck in winning. Even in GalCiv we stayed away from random events.

We're definitely trying to see what the deal is. Sadly, it's almost certainly because we're using some new DirectX 9 feature (not even a 3D feature) that some of the cards aren't supporting well yet. Let me give you an example - DirectX 9 is the first DirectX that makes it easy to use True Type fonts in a game. Previously, you had to encode your own fonts. That's one reason why most games have ugly fonts. But not all drivers are supporting this feature correctly.

The first major PC publication review of The Political Machine has come out - Computer Gaming World's 4.5 star review and an editor's choice award. We are very excited and pleased about this. As you can imagine, trying to create a political strategy game that has the right balance of realism and fun and put it together into a $20 package that has very high production values still was really a challenge. But one that we enjoyed immensely and hope you have been enjoying as well. <P

That is very useful info. Thanks!

Ubi Soft asked us to discontinue the operative's kit. So I don't have an answer for that.

Indeed, this is what's really slowing things down. People will fix their problem with something we send but not let us know. We need feedback desperately. Or like in the movie, "Help us help you!"

USA Today reviews The Political Machine and gives a play by play example of a Bush vs. Kerry game. Check it out at: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/games/2004-09-09-politicalmachine_x.htm

Other than updating your video drivers to the latest version we haven't made progress. Here's the issue in a nutshell: The Political Machine uses DirectX 9. Most drivers, even unupdated, should work fine with it. But some don't. Why DirectX 9 on a game as visually"simple" as vThe Political Machine? Two main reasons: 1) The fonts. Notice how nice the fonts are in this game compared to other computer games you've played in the past. DirectX 9 is the first vers

The Political Machine is published by Ubi Soft, one of the world's premiere game publishers. But the game was designed and developed by Stardock ( www.stardock.com ). Stardock came up with the idea for The Political Machine back in 2000 during the Florida debacle. Realizing that the country was split evenly, a strategy game idea was born. Stardock's last game, Galactic Civilizations , won numerous aw

Next week will mark the official launch of JoeUser.com, arguably the world's fastest growing blogging community on the Internet. On JoeUser.com, you can create your own free blog site and post articles on any topic you can imagine. Articles in the politics category gets syndicated out to sites like this one for instance. Visit https://www.joeuser.com to check out the articles written by thousands of others on-line or to create your own fre

While I agree that a couple of typos is unfortunate, to suggest the game was "rushed" because someone missed a typo seems a bit of a stretch. These are typos that will get addressed in subsequent updates. But to suggest that a couple of typos (and there really are only a few throughout the hundreds of pages of text in the game) is the equivalent of "riddled with bugs" strikes me as very unreasonable.

xx13xx: 1) Try the latest Stardock internal update after updating your version to 1.01. Let us know if this works please. 2) If that doesn't work, this thread https://www.politicalmachine.com/forums.asp?MID=139&CMID=139&AID=27292 will make it work since it's your video drivers. But what we are working on is trying to make the game work even without updating your drivers.

Ubi Soft requested that we not make it available anymore so we had to take it off.

As linked to from a blurb about the Political Machine, only to find that the dev in question is a pretty strident right-wing bigot. IMO, of course. Pretty ironic. In any case, to answer your petty whinings about untruths, here is an informed opinion piece from a considerably more mainstream publication than the various zealot blogs you are quoting.

If you have DesktopX installed ( www.desktopx.net ) you can run this electoral college status widget: https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=34&SkinID=109

Yes. You need to update to v1.01. There was a bug in 1.0 in which if you didn't complete a full game (i.e. saved and came back) it wouldn't count it as a completed game. 1.01 fixes that (but you'll have to restart your campaign).

That's actually pretty easy to disprove because you can set the awareness to 100% in fantasy mode and it doesn't trend Republican - it actually nominally supports Kerry.

See the beta update thread.

Only with TotalGaming.net. Stardock is not allowed by Ubi Soft to electronically distribute the released game until the end of this year.