Vote for El Presidente Moops in 2012! And forever.

I've got exactly 666 people on my island which pretty much means I'm the Commie Antichrist.

I guess I’ve always been a little bit of a people-pleaser. I hate knowing that someone is mad at me and I like to try and see the reasoning on both sides of any given argument, so when a conflict arises I try to come up with a response that will make everyone hate me the least.

Still, a video game’s a video game. It’s not real and there are no real-life consequences for being a horrible person. As a kid, I never had any qualms about drowning my Sims in a ladder-less pool or killing off random units in my Age of Empires civilization. Shooting fellow survivors in Left 4 Dead 2 matches is still always mildly hilarious and seeing if I can kill Morrowind‘s Vivec with any ease doesn’t leave me with feelings of guilt. So why do I find myself stretching imaginary budgets to their limits and beyond to bend to the whim of every reasonable citizen in Tropico 4?

Tropico 4 is a CMS (construction and management simulation) in which the player is the ruler of a struggling island nation called Tropico. You start out on a largely undeveloped landmass with very few resources and, over several decades, develop said landmass while trying to keep Tropico’s growing population happy…or oppressed. Whatever floats your boat.

I could've been Fidel Castro or Che Guevara, but why would I do that when I could wear a cowboy hat and hipster glasses?

According to Steam, I have played Tropico 4 for twenty five hours. With the options to assassinate or unjustly imprison citizens, declare martial law, destroy homes, build statues in my own honor, decrease wages, oppress rebels and start a nuclear program at my disposal, I cannot even bring myself to build a garbage dump that doesn’t also recycle. When my religious or militarist advisers suggest that I burn books and strengthen my army to quell a potential uprising, I build a new school and declare amnesty for all rebels. My people always have free food and housing and I always ensure that, if possible, wages and job quality are higher than in the rest of the Caribbean. As a result, I end up with a relatively clean island that is educated, 70% happy, fully powered by clean energy and almost entirely self-sufficient as far as imports go. Oh, and I always allow same-sex marriage because fuck you twice, religious faction. But…El Presidente’s personal wealth, and thus my score, is always relatively low because any situation that would net me cash money rather than treasury funds requires me to make kind of a dick move, and I just can’t do it.

It’s my island and I can be Newt Gingrich if I want to, yet I have not allowed El Presidente to be anything less than a class act dictator. What’s wrong with me? Maybe I’m frustrated by the current real-life political climate and just want everybody to be happy. Maybe it’s sort of an ego boost when a population of AI citizens likes me so much that they give me 90% of the vote and allow me to reign over their tiny island for an indefinite number of years. Or maybe, just maybe, I’m less of a jerkass than I was when I was ten. But probably not.

So if you’ve wondered at all where I’ve been or why I haven’t posted in a little over a month, that’s why. Partially. Sort of.

Anyway, it’s been awhile and I wanna know– what sort of dictator are you?

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