POTUS (Review) iPhone/iPod/iPad

For everyone wondering what a Sarah Palin presidency would be like, this is your chance.

All problems and solutions facing the Oval Office are dealt with in less than 140 characters. Nothing matters but your approval rating. And literally rolling the dice to make decisions is as effective as tackling the situation with your intellect.

A hardcore political junkie since the fifth grade, I’ve been a rabid devotee of wonk sims since my lengthy reign as National Fink in Hammurabi, a text-only classic a competent BASIC programmer can squeeze into 2K of memory (I did it long ago on the humblest of humble Timex-Sinclair 1000). Political sims have advanced a staggering among since (although The Doonesbury Election Game from 1996 seriously deserves resurrection) to where you could pretty much emulate a minute-by-minute replica of the 2008 presidential campaign in a MMORPG or on your desktop.

ZetaFire’s POTUS app, on the other hand, emulates the experience of finding out your donation to John Edwards went to pay for Rielle Hunter’s copy of “3,500 Spiritually Enlightened Names for your Baby.”

Maybe it’s too much to expect a 99-cent app to be deep (or maybe not, given the huge number of single- and multi-game apps at that price), but this plummets past shallow into the outright annoying. As commander-in-chief, your entire world is behind the desk in the Oval Office. There’s a laptop computer and some other things, but the only operable item is the telephone, which rings annoyingly for a few seconds before some subordinate appears on screen with some situation needing your attention.

Maybe there’s a coup in a foreign country, for instance, and the new dictator wants aid from us. You’ll see a menu with three simple choices – something like “do nothing,” “send $50 million” or “send $100 million” – along with icons for a notebook, dice and the advisor. The notebook, obviously, allows note taking, although I can’t imagine anyone needed to (some situations come up again, but it’s not like you’re trying to memorize the State of the Union without a teleprompter). The advisor will offer a few words that may or may not offer guidance. The dice will select one of the three at random.

Once a decision is made you’ll what, if any, effect it has on your approval rating. This seems to have at best a loose connection to reality, as you can gain 15 points for talking to hostile dictators and lose 15 for talking to the leader of Canada. Forgetting those are the kind of opinion swings more likely to occur by declaring war or getting caught in drag in the Lincoln Bedroom, there doesn’t seem to be any effort to correlate them with political moods in the real world. I took a massive hit, for instance, for vetoing a bill authorizing drilling in ANWR, an issue that’s much like abortion in where the country has long been divided. (Full disclose: Lest anyone accuse me of being a flaming liberal, I’m a longtime former Alaskan and lifelong registered independent who believes we should and will eventually drill there, but not while other sources on the North Slope are still adequate.)

Also, speaking of unreality, you start with an 85 percent approval rating in the polls. That’s roughly the brief pinnacle a president sees at the successful conclusion of a war. Any modern chief executive with a rating in the high 50s would probably be ecstatic.

“Normal” and “challenging” difficulty levels are offered, but I didn’t see much difference between them. I did, however, notice the situations were presented in largely – maybe precisely – the same sequence. I don’t know how many there are, but I labored through 20 minutes of them each time before it became too much to bear.

Apps like these I’d prefer to avoid giving attention to altogether, but with the political scene as turbulent as it is today it’s likely there’s a sizable number of iDevice owners who might be tempted to show they can run the country better than Hussein Soetoro. Much as it’d be nice to give the Birthers and Truthers something to distract them for a while, POTUS isn’t the solution.

Mark Sabbatini

POTUS by ZetaFire
$0.99
Category: Simulation
Language: English
Rated 4+
Requirements: iOS 4.0 or later.
Size: 3.5 MB