More black humor is provided by direct action cards. You get three of these at the start of the game, and one more is dealt out at the start of each year. These allow for all sorts of activities, from blowing up opposing factories to nuisance lawsuits to enlisting child labor. Perhaps the funniest moments are provided by the stereotypically slimy sales executives, who respond to every click with comments like "You're brilliant!" and "I'm all over that!"

Conquer the world with soda, cars, aircraft, or computers.

Yet perhaps the most involving aspect of The Corporate Machine is the quality of the computer opponents. Even on the easier difficulty settings, your opposition will make every effort at building a powerful presence and attempting to take you right out of the marketplace. The computer players typically begin at a distance from your corporate head office, depending upon which map you choose to play on (everything is available, from regional maps to the entire planet), and insidiously move closer to your home turf with the passing of each year. The invasion begins slowly, but quickly accelerates until you suddenly discover that there's more than double the demand for a Calvin Kleen car in your host territory of Egypt than there is for one of yours. Computer enemies will pull out all the stops in doing so, using every available direct action card and dirty trick available to make sure that Joe Sixpack chooses their product.

Of course, this works the opposite way as well. As you expand, you must advance toward districts controlled by your rivals. You can do so in just about any way that you can imagine. You might go the honest route and simply try to win consumers over by offering the best car, soda, plane, or computer for the money. Technology trees branch off from the construction of different types of buildings, letting you fashion a specific approach for success. Go research heavy, and you'll want to construct the lab, enhanced lab, and lab complex. Try for top productivity and worker satisfaction, and you'll order your contractors to design a manufacturing plant and training facilities. You could also be a bit more devious and specialize in the questionable art of selling. Put up a marketing complex, and you can stage television and radio ad barrages promoting the coolness of your merchandise...or you can sink right into the sewer and set up a FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) whisper campaign smearing the opposition. Any way that gains you a foothold into an enemy-controlled region is fair play, so you might as well pull out all the stops.

There's plenty of variety to keep you interested for a long time.

The success or failure of these endeavors is communicated to you in the form of statistics. These numbers aren't hard to break down into sensible factors governing your future actions, as much of it devolves to simple laws of supply and demand, though it can be very difficult to figure out where to find this data. Both the interface and the manual for The Corporate Machine are Byzantine, the former because of a complex jumble of graphs and the absence of tooltips and the latter because of horrendous organization and a lack of specifics. Although the game itself is strong enough to overcome such inherent weaknesses, it would be a lot easier to approach The Corporate Machine if it possessed a better menu system--let alone an in-game tutorial. Presentation might also be a barrier to some. The game's graphics and sound are at least several years behind the times, though they're adequate.

These few shortcomings are all minor when viewed in contrast with the game's numerous great qualities. Winning design, powerful artificial intelligence, and a great sense of humor make The Corporate Machine one of the best strategy games so far this year.