God Game

Do you remember the last time you fully geeked out? You are about to. Universe Sandbox takes the joyous freeplay of Powder and such into 3D. Astronomical scales are laid out for you with a fully zooming and rotatable camera, trails tie knots and stream like ribbons, light waves pulsate at remarkably slow speeds, time is at your command. You can throw a star through the asteroid belt and see what happens. It brings out the awed child in all of us.

Occasionally we cover something that is produced by the mainstream industry, thought under exceptional terms and conditions - like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which, while funded by THQ was dragged through the long, hard bootstrap by a first-time Ukrainian company that did it because of love. Maxis is, in a very different way, another exceptional source of mainstream games, an oasis of life in a corporate desert (while Trion, across the lawn from EA HQ, is like Dubai or something, with high-tech solar panels and hydroponic gardens).

You'll find Virtual Villagers 2 on the casual game sites--but don't let that mislead you. This isn't the usual match-three game, but an extremely unusual--and remarkably compelling--game, in which you help an island of primitives survive and thrive. Unusually, the "world" continues when you're not playing--so, Tamagotchi-like, you need to check in every few days to see what's happening and adjust your strategy.

Virtual Villagers is an offbeat "life sim" game in which you control a village of castaways on what seems to be a South Pacific island, helping them to build something like an adequate life for themselves. What's unique about it in comparison to other life sims is that "time" progresses even when the game isn't running--in other words, if you don't come back to the game for several weeks, you may find that something fairly horrific has happened to your civilization.

Game Tunnel's 2005 Sim Game of the Year

Books can be important; movies can be important. Games, however, are the degraded purview of violent male adolescents. Democracy cannot exist.

Except that it does, of course. It is not without flaw; but it's a game that every citizen of a democracy should play, to get a better gut understanding of the pressures faced by their leaders--and every citizen of a tyranny should play, to get a better gut understanding of why democracy, whatever its flaws, is better than the alternatives.