They have changed, obviously, especially when 5 introduced multiplayer, and a new era-based structure. But my complaint, see, my complaint is that they haven't changed enough. Tropico has carried that torch for 20 years, and they've got better with each release. The great personality-driven management games I grew up on, and whose loss some of us lamented for so long, never really went away. The crooks and the incompetents and the egomaniacs are ridiculous figures, and so cartoonish that Tropico resists feeling mean spirited or bigoted. "A wacky game about being a dictator of an island in central america!" is a phrase that would probably get my guard up today, but the butt of the joke in Tropico is always the rulers. Perhaps more remarkably still, they've never felt sneering. It's easy to underestimate the power of aesthetics in a strategy game, but staring at a lush island paradise for tens of hours is hard to pass up, and since the shift to 3D in 2009 in Tropico 3, they're positively gorgeous games. Sure you might build a capitalist hellhole or miserable stalinist prison town, but the islands invariably make for a gorgeous sight. And somehow, despite all of this, the mood is light and jovial. Tropico is a game that can reward corruption, assassinations, xenophobic immigration policies, and openly dictatorial regimes. Maintaining support and control of these factions is another defining facet of the series, but it's often overlooked how again, it's the personality and tone that makes them work. The schlubs you rule over are divided into factions, most notably the capitalists and communists, whose demands aren't all mutually exclusive, but are difficult to reconcile. If you start out as a rum magnate, it makes sense to build an economy on sugar farms. Your choice of ruler doesn't dictate (oho) how to play, but it will inform it at least. And already, here's where the series is a little different. Quite literally too, since you start every Tropico game by designing an all-powerful ruler to oversee the construction of a society from scratch, selecting backgrounds and traits for a variety of bonuses and restrictions to what you can build or command. Like most of the legendary classic management/building games, its success relied heavily on a colourful personality. It was a dark time, and Tropico shone all the more for it. Real time strategy in general was a dormant power throughout the 2000s, and the most ludicrous, yet somehow loudest voices even insisted that the PC itself was finished as a platform. When PopTop Software (known for 1998's Railroad Tycoon II, absorbed into Take-Two Interactive before Tropico was finished, and eventually merged into Firaxis Games in 2006) released the first Tropico in 2001, the city building genre was on the cusp of a decline. It's a remarkable series when you look at the timeline.
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