Global geopolitical simulators have a pretty spotty history as strategy games. Chris Crawford's effort in 1985 with Balance of Power was notable for both its ambition and its sterility as a game. 1993's Shadow President from D.C. True was more detailed and a better game, but it still suffered from basic playability issues. While it follows squarely in the tradition of the aforementioned games, DreamCatcher Interactive's SuperPower allows you to actually watch the missile trails and points of impact when there is a thermonuclear war, which is something the preceding two games didn't offer. Unfortunately, that's about the only thing it has going for it.

Nuclear exchanges are played out on the world map.

SuperPower bills itself as both a wargame and a geopolitical simulator. The manual makes much of the fact that the data in the game is as accurate as possible. The game doesn't lack for ambition--it allows you to take control of any one of 140 nations in the year 1997 and make decisions regarding its political, military, and socioeconomic development. To do this, you allocate funds in four areas--demography, politics, military, and economy--and make decisions on weapons development and perform espionage and covert operations. On the surface, it seems like there are an overwhelming number of options. Extensive play, however, reveals that the game is not as deep as it seems.

SuperPower is played in one-week turns. During each turn, you can allocate your funds, purchase or sell resources (energy, ore, cereal, meat, and wealth), raise or lower taxes, direct weapons research, and make requests of foreign governments. You can, of course, also invade other countries. You don't represent a specific leader or political party, so there are no elections to worry about if you're a democracy. Your government stability actually refers to the stability of the system itself, so if a democracy falls, the country is thrown into anarchy. If the country in question is the one you're playing, the game ends.

There are no difficulty levels in the game, as your chosen objectives determine how hard it will be to win. Objectives can be stay in power, balance resources, eliminate armed rebels, and conquer the world. Only staying in power is mandatory, although you can add any or all of the other three. Obviously, conquering the world will be harder as Albania than as the United States, so you can adjust your level of difficulty that way. Norway has no armed rebels, so eliminating them is fairly easy. And so on.

Each action you take in SuperPower has numerous effects. For example, raising industrial taxes increases your available money, but lowers your production capacity, resources, urbanization level, and population support. Buying ore from another nation increases your production, population support, government stability, and urbanization level, and it improves your relations with the country you bought the ore from. It also costs you money.

Notable by its absence is any kind of simulation of world financial markets, and some of the game's apparent assumptions about the importance of corporations and their influence feel quite dated. There are also some amusing socialist biases built into the game mechanics, such as the fact that donating to an international monetary fund automatically increases your population support, while lowering a country's contribution lowers it.

Conventional forces move from point to point.

As a real-world simulator, the game falls completely flat. In one game we played as Finland, we invaded Sweden on the first turn (January 1, 1997) and conquered that country easily. For the rest of the game, Sweden was run as a conquered nation, with hardly a peep from the world at large (except Belgium, which broke off relations). While public support for the Finnish government dropped, it dropped more when Finnish taxes were raised by 10 percent. A few months later, a global war broke out when Vietnam invaded Mexico.

The game comes with several scenarios, one of which gives you (as the United Kingdom) the task of destabilizing the Polish government because of a trade dispute. After invading Warsaw and being repulsed, the UK was invaded by Bulgaria. And Belgium as well, which seems to act as sort of a global policeman. Shortly thereafter, Russia invaded Japan, and France invaded Germany. It seems pretty clear that there are some problems with the way the game handles alliances.