Tropico posts

This Tropico 4 trailer doesn't really show much. Instead, it's more of an announcement for the newest entry in the long-running series of island dictatorship sims. If it's anything like the previous games - and it most undoubtedly will be - it'll be chock full of all sorts of edicts, special buildings angry citizens, and political pratfalls. We just wish this particular trailer had been a bit more interesting, though. One can only look at words for so long!

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It's been a fairly slow week for the first half but today things picked up with a number of new game announcements including a new Section 8 game that, from the looks of things, is being self-published by Timegate. Cool.

• New bug patches have been released via Steam for Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, Tropico 3 and Tropico 3 Absolute Power, and the Counter-Strike Source beta.
• Until 1 pm Eastern time Friday you can get Blood Bowl on Direct2Drive for just $19.95 and Star Wars Battlefront 2 for a mere $4.95
• There's a new graphics driver hotfix for ATI AMD Radeon graphics cards that improves performance for H.A.W.X.

Kalypso Media's revival of the Tropico franchise with 2009's Tropico 3 seems to have been successful enough for the publisher to get another entry in the island dictator sim series. Today the publisher announced plans for Tropico 4 which will be developed once again by the team at Haemimont Games.

Due out in the second quarter of 2011, Tropico 4 will once again have you as the leader of an island nation. However this time you have the option of turning your nation into a true global super power. Look for a new campaign over 20 missions and 10 maps, 20 new buildings, six new disasters and more. The PC version will allow you to send Twitter messages from within the game, send screenshots from the game to your Facebook page and compare your ranking with other players.

[Via email press release]

Sometimes you just need to sit down, slide a floppy into your A: drive, and enjoy gaming retro style. We know this all too well! That's why we have a list of the best and brightest from days long gone. These are some of our favorite games of all time, and we're sure that you'll love them as much as we do, if not more. Welcome to Boot Disk, and enjoy the retro ride!

Last week we talked about one of the better business simulations, Railroad Tycoon 2. It's still considered a classic to most fans of the genre, but we talked about it plenty then. The developer, not content to merely work with Sid Meier's formula, decided to invent their own. The result was Tropico, a simulation of life as a tropical dictator. It is a satirical take on both Latin America politics and the business simulation genre, and serves as a good example for what a developer can make when it simply steps outside the box. PopTop may be no more, and the franchise may belong to a different publisher, but we can still reminisce about a strategy gaming classic.

This could be the true low point of the PC game year. There's simply not a lot being released to stores or online in the next seven days (we refuse to mention a certain Disney movie tie-in). So we are pretty much left with a collection of games that is designed to set people up for the next game in the series.

Tropico Reloaded: This is a collection of the first two games in the island management series that were first released by 2K Games. The first Tropico, developed by the now defunct Poptop Software in 2001, put you as dictator of an island nation. The collection also comes with its expansion, Paradise Island. Finally the collection has Tropico 2, developed by the also defunct Frog City Software, in 2003, For some reason the sequel has you as a pirate running a pirate island in the 18th century. The new collection is published by Kalypso Media who is re-releasing these games in preparation for its September release of Tropico 3 where the goes back to the island dictator premise of the original title.

One of the more interesting strategy-sim game series is coming back via a new publisher and a new developer. Kalypso Media announced today that their have aquired the rights to the Tropico PC game franchise from publisher Take Two Interactive. Kalypso intends to release Tropico 3 this summer which will be developed by Haemimont Games.

At the moment details are scarce on Tropico 3 other than it will be based on the first game in the series released in 2001 by Take Two's now defunct Gathering of Developers brand and developed by the now defunct Poptop Software. That game had the player controlling a Caribbean island country as a dictator type in the present day (the second Tropico game, released in 2003, switched the game's premise to being a pirate in the Caribbean in the 18th century). Kalypso did say the game would have "...state-of-the-art graphics, complex gameplay similar to the other titles in the series and a comprehensive multiplayer mode."