Ecology

Created by PM Studios (which did ETROM: The Astral Essence, a beautiful action/adventure RPG with extremely awkward controls), Eco Warriors is a "serious" game funded by the government of Italy's Apulia region, with EU support. It's primarily in Italiano, but the English language version contains English subtitles. Ciao, Eco Warrior.

The ideal global warming game, it seems to me, would be a detailed simulation of the global climate as well as the global economy -- and preferably one that would allow you to tinker with the assumptions, both at the macro and micro level. At the macro level, I'm imagining scenarios ranging from "We're all doomed!" to "Bah, the Copenhagen Consensus has it right," and at the micro allowing you to twiddle individual knobs (e.g., "nuclear power plants are safe as houses" to "they go blooey with alarming frequency").

Climate Challenge is not the ideal global warming game -- but it's surprisingly engaging.

Designed to introduce issues of energy management and environmental protection to schoolchildren, ElectroCity allows the player to control a New Zealand town and its surrounding landscape -- building power plants, extracting fossil fuels, trading on the energy market, and setting conservation policies. At the end of 150 turns, the player is graded on the town's size, environmental cleanliness, energy supply, and citizen satisfaction. The finished town layout can be uploaded to the ElectroCity server, to be viewed and ranked against other submitted towns.

Yes, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa is a "tycoon" game--but quite different from others of the genre. The objective isn't to build a business, but a balanced ecosystem. For example, one level's objective is to have some number of lions in play--but to get that many, you have to build up your zebra population so there's enough prey to support your lions. And to support that many zebra, you need to plant enough bushes to sustain them.

Yet it also isn't a hard-core simulation in the style of Sim Life (and thank goodness); it's a simple, straightforward game with pleasantly animated African wildlife, and a tutorial system that anyone who can read (and this is a good game for kids) will find good and sufficient. Contrariwise, it's a tougher game to win, even on "Easy" setting, than most casual games (many of which can be won by a monkey clicking randomly).