LONDON – PLAYING AT BEING PRESIDENT

“Hell Tyrolene, I wants to have a go at them there trade embargoes too! If some jumped up basketball player from Illinois can do it, then I sure as chicken shit can! Now, hold my can of cheeze whizz while I go get me a copy of ‚ÄòCommander in Chief’. Hell yeeaah”

Gross national stereotypes aside (well, for a paragraph at least) if you share the presidential ambition to choke on a pretzel whilst having your first lieutenant serviced by a beret-wearing intern, then ‚Äòtis the season to be jolly. You can be President too ‚Äì and you don’t even need to put on underwear to do it. Those patriots over at Eversim games are grabbing the bull of democracy by the franchise-cash-crapping horns and bringing out a new version of the game ‚ÄòCommander in Chief’ the very day Barack Obama is sworn in as President. See what they’ve done there? They are celebrating the new Presidency by letting us all have a go at fucking it up ourselves.

You’ve already got sweaty thumbs at the idea of ‚ÄòGuantanamo Bay Worms’ right? ‘Commander in Chief’ allows you to shit down the neck of international relations in all sorts of other exciting ways too: Proposition 8, for example, is worth fucking around with, pissing off African bishops and Sean Penn in turns. You could also inject some spice into the Special Relationship by secretly turning Portsmouth into a military air base, pointed squarely at Putin’s kitchen without Gordon Brown ever even realising. Plus Hilary’s yellow suits are just sure to go down a storm in those Afghanistan opium fields.

You’ll have a budget, your very own cabinet (props to the first person to make theirs entirely out of ex-NOFX and 5ive members), information from over 50 international organisations and 192 countries to wilfully invade at the first sign of you getting bored trying to finish the game properly.

You’d never get a British game like this, first of all because we can’t make anything fun and secondly you’d have to water the name down a bit. Maybe ‚ÄòSpecial Advisor in Almost-Command’ would be better. And you’d have to bring it out on the day that Fern Britton gets her new gastric band fitted, or something equally historic. There could be the chance to employ every single member of your extended family as a researcher; a couple of doughy interns to grope up against a photocopier; several thousand reams of paperwork to ignore and the chance that the police will come and ruin everything by searching through your files marked ‚Äòblackmail’. But you’d still have to ask America’s permission to nuke the world ‚Äì which is really the only reason to play this game.

NELL FRIZZELL