And now for something completely different!

Taking a cue from the designers of the Football manager game by Sports Interactive, which keeps the football buffs glued to the monitors, the company Politics Interactive has decided to go ahead with its plans for the Nation Manger game. " NM is primarily for people who want to gain a real time experience of running a country, or political aspirants. This game is aimed to target audience from 25 onwards(age). " says the manager of Politics Interactive Mr. Barracks Bushama.

Including the political scenarios of over 50 countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe to Iraq to India, this game is destined to be a very big hit. The company is devising a foolproof marketing strategy for India especially. " In a politics-crazy environment as in India, this game will be a very big hit if marketed properly. For the convenience of the Indians we have designed this game in 10 different languages of which 4 of them are Indian. For India we are developing the game in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Bengali. We also have Malayalam, Kannada and Bhojpuri versions in the pipeline." says PI's India spokesperson like-you-care-abt-the-name.

The Beta version of the game is out and the following is the game review by our very own game-tester-guy:

" To start with the game can run on any computer. No specific requirements. The installation process is very simple and dint take me more than a few seconds in my computer(a 3.2 Ghz, Intel Pentium 4). The game's Interface is excellent making it very easy to use and for a
person with decent gaming aptitude, getting into grips with this game is only a matter of time. The game play is very tough and very close to reality . The Beta version had only three countries to choose from India, Pakistan and U.S. I being the Indian, i am ,chose India and in India you can choose what states or union territories you want to include. I included T.N, Kerala and Karnataka for a start.You can state the game as one of the following

1) Senior Politician
2) Seasoned Politician
3) Head of some caste or religious group
4) A cine actor
5) Son or daughter of some party loyalist
6)A lower cadre follower
7) A don
and then have to chose a party or play as an independent candidate.

I gave Seasoned politician and i chose D.M.K to start my game so that i can be on the ruling side.

The game is very close to reality because, as soon as i took charge of D.M.K, the news read game tester takes charge as D.M.K chief. Immediately the party broke into three parts one headed by Stalin , one headed by Azhagiri and the other under Arcot N.Veerasami. As a result i lost power and had to contest the elections. That's how tough the game is.

The game has tips blooming from nowhere . Some of them are tips that real politicians follow like

1) If you are an independent and have just started with a new party going against a well known actor on political grounds will enhance your reputation.But beware this may also diminish ur chances if over used.

2) If you have an alliance with the communist party , the commies will marshal a lot of uprisings against your policies that involve even the smallest hint of privatization. Giving scant or no regard to those will always have a positive effect on your party.As the commies just threaten and they wont withdraw support easily.

3) Handling the press is one of the most important things in the game. You should be able to give ambiguous answers to straight forward questions this will help you a lot when you jump alliances.

as for the rest, play and learn from the game yourself.

cheers,
we-just-lied-a-lot corporation.