Last time on Playing 2008, we introduced you to the little time-waster Presidential Pong. This edition is about a more serious political game: President Forever 2008 +Primaries.

Let me warn you before we begin, however: once you get this game and learn all of its intricacies, you will become the biggest nerd you know. This game will have you thinking of politics more than you already do and dreaming up strategeries to win not only the general election, but your party’s nomination to get the chance to run in the general.

That being said, I give this game made by TheorySpark and 80soft.com a solid 9.5 out of 10. Simply put, it is amazing in its depth and scope. Where other election sims such as The Political Machine have the corner on graphics and ease of gameplay, President Forever completely owns the depth of a political campaign. Let me give you a few examples (and I don’t really know where to begin):

• Before you begin, you can completely customize every candidate, including many that have already dropped out of the race (or never even entered in the first place — Newt, Frist, Allen, and Gore are here, for example, with a default of being turned off when you start the game). You can change: their stances on 18 different issues, their ratings on 10 different characteristics from debate skill to charisma to integrity, how much money they start with, what their starting percentages are in each of the 51 states (+DC), what percentage of the electorate starts out alienated from them, who they can get to campaign for/with them, and a myriad of other options. In short, when I say each candidate is completely customizable, I mean completely. And if one of the 27 preloaded candidates doesn’t suit you, you can also make your own candidate from scratch.
• When you start the game, one of the first orders of business is to set the themes of your campaign. You can choose any three out of those 18 issues to be your theme – this is what your surrogates will talk about when they campaign for you, it’s what you will campaign more effectively on, and it’s what effects how voters respond to you.
• That’s not all — each of the 51 states is rated on those 18 issues as well, so if you campaign against gun control say, in Wyoming, you’re not going to win any voters over. Unions are a touchy subject depending where you’re campaigning, as is the environment. I’ve found the trio of Immigration, War on Terror, and Balanced Budget works well in the GOP primary.
• You have political influence points (at differing levels depending on the candidate you choose — for example, someone who has a lot of favors to call in like a Clinton or McCain has more PIPs than, say, a Huckabee or Richardson) that you can choose to spend in a number of various ways. You can recruit “crusaders” — surrogates who will campaign for you based on your completely customizable (seeing a pattern yet?) campaign strategy. You can try to get your competitors to drop out of the race or even endorse you. Or you can woo Governors and national political action groups to win their endorsements as well. You have a limited number of PIPs, so use them wisely.
• You can run TV, radio, and newspaper ads that are all different prices and different effectiveness ratings depending on the states they are run in. You can run each for a total of 5 turns (weeks in primary season, days in general election mode), so run them wisely and always have one in the pipe ready to launch.
• While you’re out campaigning, there is a chance you will gain insight on a particular issue while campaigning on it, then you can use this insight in a new ad to increase it’s effectiveness rating.
• You can perform behind the scenes “research” on your competitors to find things to smear them with, or you can just forgo the niceties and just launch negative ads. Careful, though: negative ads always have a chance of backfiring and hurting your numbers. Chance of backfiring and how long it takes to do research are modified by the opponent’s integrity rating.

You get the idea. This game is huge, and it is deep. You will probably lose the first couple times you play it (I lost the first two times, once to Ron Paul (!) and once to John McCain, before going on to win the general election as Mitt Romney over Hillary Clinton), but once you get it’s intricacies figured out you will absolutely love this game. Your friends and family will never stop calling your a nerd, and you won’t care.

Oh, and the game is expanding, even as I type this. Once you buy the game (for 20 bucks, for crying out loud! It would be a bargain at three times that price!), you have a button called “AutoUpdate” you can turn on or off. Turn it on and leave it on. It checks for updates of the game every time you run the program. And by updates, some of what I mean is updated scenarios… tired of playing the 2008 scenario? Try taking on Kerry as Bush in 2004. Or try winning with McCain in 2000. Or play as Perot in 1992 and become the first independent President. Oh yeah – did I mention this game was deep?

There’s only a couple problems with the game that I can see. The only thing not customizable is primary/caucus dates, although most of the errors have been taken care of via the AutoUpdate feature. It would still be nice to fix some other dates, or just to create fantasy scenarios by putting in your own. Also, when setting the week’s campaign schedule, you are only allowed to do one campaign event per day, whether that’s debate prep, barnstorming, giving a speech, or whatever. It would have been nice to be able to plan multiple campaign stops in one day. Those two issues, however, are small in the grand scheme of things. Finally, something that is easily taken care of due to the customizable nature of the game is that the minor candidates such as Paul, Kucinich, and the like are oftentimes way too strong in this game (I once started playing a general election as Romney against Kucinich, believe it or not, before restarting in the primary season to get a different competitor). Just edit their stats, though, and they’ll be better represented.

The name of the game for President Forever 2008 +Primaries is replay value, and there is plenty of it to go around. You will never get tired of wasting entire afternoons, weekends, and yes, maybe even workdays pursuing your quest for the Presidency with this game. Buy it now. It will be the best $20 you’ve spent in a long time.