Balance Real Needs, or Cynically Work to Reelection?
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 they 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.

If Sam Goldwyn Were Alive, This Would Be His Favorite Game

That's because Hollywood Mogul 3 is what it says it is: a game for wanna-be studio heads. If you'd rather be Michael Eisner than Martin Scorsese, this may well be the game for you.

Hollywood Mogul 3 is to Molyneux's The Movies as Football Mogul is to John Madden Football. That is, it's a data-driven game with enormous detail in which your role is to manage the studio, not watch cute animations or move animated characters around. Visually, it's far from stunning--some have likened it to a spreadsheet--but the level of detail, and the complexity of the underlying model is stunning (and somewhat overwhelming to a first-time player; luckily, there's a good tutorial).

Tycoon Games are Fun Again

Kaloki is a classic sim/tycoon game; here, instead of running a theme park or a railroad, you're running something like Babylon Five, a small trading station in space, with starships showing up and wanting to buy stuff. You build out from your space station core, balancing power and structural needs against the desire to have as many profit-making enterprises as possible.

Along the way, goofy alien characters talk to you, and you're faced with a progression of levels, each with their own challenge, in the classic tycoon-game fashion. But the dialog is fun, the tone light and entertaining, and you never get sunk into the tedium of some tycoon games, where meeting the demands of a particular level requires a lot of grinding labor.

Virtual Villagers is an offbeat sim/tycoon 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 sim/tycoon games 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.

God Games Go Casual

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.