Tropico 3

There's something appealing about a good, old-fashioned dictatorship, so long as you're the dictator. It's a tempting kind of fantasy, whether you feel like being a despotic tyrant, the architect of a tropical utopia, or more likely, a fumbling idiot yanking ineffectually on the reins of power as the cart of society plunges into the ravine of tortured metaphor -- which is fun in its own way. Tropico 3 delivers on those fantasies better than any game in recent memory, but that's sort of an easy thing to say, given that city management sims have long since taken the trophy for World's Deadest Genre, and none of them ever bothered much with giving us banana republics to run into the ground. But I don't want to damn the thing with faint praise. Tropico 3 is a great distraction, if a bit dated and minimal-looking.
Tropico 3 isn't going to blow anyone's eyeballs off with its graphics. Not that graphics are usually why anyone plays a game like this -- there's enough detail, and you can zoom in close to admire the crumbling tenements or the graffiti on the high school walls, but far more time will be spent trying to figure out whether to make your money off tourism or tobacco exports, in between fending off assassination attempts from people who caught on that you were rigging the elections.