I don’t get it. There are two election campaigns going on right now (Canada and U.S.) which should be making for oodles of amusing web-based games satirizing politics but quite frankly, I’m finding the selection pretty bland.
Lets take Death By 1000 Cold Cuts for example. In the response to Tory Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz’s ill-timed quip, players are invited to fire a cold cut cannon at Ritz’s floating head.
First off as a reaction to tasteless comments it seems well, a tad tasteless to make a video game. However, it suffers from another issue that’s far worse: it isn’t very fun. The game only lasts about 30 seconds, if that. I will give it credit, though, for reminding players to vote on October 14th.
Surely there must be something more exciting south of the border (after all, their election campaign is more exciting than ours…)
Sadly, no. Over there we get Polar Palin, where you play as a polar bear trying to blow-up oil rigs in Alaska while avoid Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin driving a tank. It’s a better concept than Spaced Invaders with cold cuts but still isn’t very fun.
It’s rather disheartening given that there was some really cool stuff during the American primary season. I seem to recall one game that feature Barack Obama dueling Hillary Clinton at rock-paper-scissors among others.
Perhaps I should just suck it up and grab a copy of Stardock’s The Political Machine 2008 which has received decent reviews. Too bad there doesn’t seem to be a Canadian counter-part (then again, it’s difficult to develop such games in a country where set election dates are ignored…)
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