Game Review: Election (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

Political Parties and Policies

After a couple of short pages of instructions, the game begins with you choosing which party you wish to represent.  The three choices of party are Conservative, Labour or Alliance.  Think of the Alliance party in Election as the Liberal Democrats.

Each party has a list of seven different policies, and you get to choose three on which you will focus your campaign for your manifesto.  You go first and then the computer displays the other two parties seven and chooses three and lists them on the screen.

Sometimes the computer will select the same policies (so for example you may see one of the same reappear!) which is weird.  It obviously must be selecting at random and if it just happens to duplicate a policy, then it’ll appear again.

Graphics

There are only three different types of building and residencies in Pendell.  They are either low-cost housing, suburban housing or highrise [sic] flats.  The colour of the buildings is the way in which they are likely to vote.  Cyan (light blue) for Conservative, red for Labour or yellow for Alliance.  Each street can have up-to 15 properties shown (remember some are high-rise flats so they’ll have more residents).

Notice that I mention the word “likely”, as the instructions state that some may not be fully figures aren’t deliberately accurate.  The only way to fully know is on election day when the votes have been cast and counted.  Treat these more as a graphical guide (or ongoing opinion poll) to see where you are more likely to win or wish to work and campaign on for votes.  You’ll also see how the named streets originally intended to vote compared to now, so you can decide where to canvas.

Being a very early Mastertronic release, Election uses the standard Mastertronic skyscraper as it’s loading screen.

Ten Day Routine

Played over 10 days, the same order of play repeats over.  You can choose to pay £200 for election prediction results, whether to spend money advertising on a billboard in a street and whether to appear in the local evening paper.  You can bid on both (provided you have the funds) and it’ll tell you if you were outbid and which party won to advertise on a billboard who got a write up the paper.  Potential votes can be won on lost depending on who has seen these or read them.

You can also see how your party is polling, how Pendell is likely to vote.

Political Strategy

Each decision that you make will end up costing campaign money and should you not get outbid, will not cost a penny but means missing out on potential votes.

By making appearances to discuss your manifesto, you have 25 points to weigh up.  Depending on the question, you may want to put a lot of points into an answer or if it’s on another parties campaign, may want to give it less points.  Sometimes, you’ll be told if another party is like to win or hold a potential street so use your points wisely to try and sway the voters your way.

You do need to take note of how the streets are voting and where to concentrate your efforts and manage your funds but the end counting of the election results is devastatingly slow.

Once you’ve used up your 25 points, you’ll get to see a progress report and how many streets you have gained or lost votes in.  It’s then onto the next day.

Sound

This is extremely limited and as the in-game instructions advise, listening to the audio cues can assist you.

From what I could tell, each of the three parties had their own sound effect when the streets were displayed and if they one had a majority or was a target street (not sure which), then it would play a different sound.  That’s how I interpreted it, anyway.

Apart from that, at the very beginning, as the opening presentation screen appears, you hear beeps increasing in pitch as the word Election flashes down the screen.

Random Events

Some days, you’ll see messages which can be about the following (there are others too):

• Voters being dissatisfied in politics or you are not campaigning the way people expect.
• National newspaper reports and whether the public liked the report or enjoyed it.
• Work forces and how many people have been employed or made redundant and whether they blame the government.
• If you’ve had a disaster and lost your campaign manager and some funds.
• People disliked 2 major parties and whether it goes into your favour.
• Internal wrangling decreasing your popularity.
• Defence of public services, trade, capital punishment, whether a relation has gone to prison or even if there is a heatwave and everyone is happy!

The gameplay is very slow

Election has been written in Basic and it shows.  There can be some short delays and some of the voting screens take a while to calculate.  This is possibly deliberate (to build up some drama) in some places as you see the votes being counted next to your party and whether you win a particular street’s votes.

The downside though is that once the election day comes, it can take around 15 minutes for the game to run through all 24 streets and tell you whether you’ve had to step away from politics for now until next time or have made a great victory!

The delay is agonising and you just hope you don’t get a power-cut in the meantime!

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