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Fun for the first week
It should be stated at the beginning that this is a Northstar protected game, and that Northstar systems do turn Trojan on you. My anti-virus just recently deleted the game and quarantined the executables.


The gameplay is more fast paced than the original, but also a bit more simplified. Gone are the days of setting up Coups in 3rd world nations and controlling their puppet governments, not when you successfully stage one the rest of the world starts attacking you, and the country you over took will just start getting invaded by other countries. Usually Italy, China and Turkey. Playing as a 3rd World nation is substantially harder too as the AI now likes to become imperialistic at random intervals, mostly Poland, China and Turkey, making it very hard to keep a stabilized nation anywhere in Africa or Asia. But its still fun to Nuke the world and watch the fallout destroy continents at a time.

Good Sim
This a very interactive sim with a steep learning curve. Has bugs, have to download a patch to get past the cd key. Will not appeal to everyone. If you like sims, and you like problem solving (a lot) this is the game for you.

Average game, terrible stability
I really wanted to like this game. I think that its basic premise is very innovative, and I looked forward to a combo of military strategy and economic managment.
However, this game just doesn't deliver. Bugs ranging from graphical glitches to horribly obvious exploits can be found everywhere. The AI is incredibly stupid. You can get the US to buy 1 piece of your land for trillions of dollars, get people to declare war on Iraq or North Korea just by asking them, and manipulate common markets to make triliions. The only redeming feature is the few diehard fans who are still trying to mod this game into what it should have been in the first place. Unless you are absoltuley desparate for this type of game, you shouldn't buy it.

I've seen a lot better
Buggy. This game crashed on me every twenty minutes until I got the patch. After the patch it was nearly impossible to play. Nations would just go rogue and start attacking far away countries. What is the most absurd to me is this game just doesn't take into account the U.S. Navy's sole ability to project war onto other continents. All the Navies in the game are capable of sending their warships all around the world and with enough gun ships, they can sink a U.S. carrier. I've also tried playing as many African nations, and it's nearly impossible, their economies are too small and they have huge militaries they can't possibly sustain. They go bankrupt in a few years. Also, the oddest thing that happened after the patch was the elections. The Republican party started winning. And I don't just mean in the U.S.! Soon the entire world was controlled by the Republican Party. While the idea is kinda funny to me, it's completely unrealistic and a huge bug.
The only fun part is playing as the US and attacking small countries. You overwhelm them so much it's kinda fun. You can take Cuba in a week. But once you get bored having the biggest military, the game's flaws become much harder to ignore.

Frustrating
Excellent premise but this game is extremely fragile -- the least memory distraction makes the whole game lock up or shut down, and if you're playing in a LAN, it'll lock up all the computers linked into the game. Too much emphasis on military silliness to sell it to warmongering nerds. The designers would have been better advised to counterbalance the economic and political power and actions in the game, which would be a more realistic real-world scenario than the childish overtemptation for invasion and war found in this game.