Eco Tycoon: Project Green (Windows)

ECO TYCOON: PROJECT GREEN asks you to make the world safer by reducing carbon dioxide levels as you build power plants and deal with the unfortunate effects of global warming. Play this simulation right, and you'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams as you save the world's environment.

After you install the software on your PC, you'll be privy to a tutorial. By moving the map of the Earth with your mouse and touchpad, you can choose an area of the world in which you'd like to build mines and power plants. Click on various buttons on the left to erect these industrial monoliths, both eco-friendly and non-eco-friendly (like coal mines). Along the way, environmental crises will crop up to throw a wrench in your best laid plans.

While the soundtrack soothes with a kind of techno-tinged new age music, the tutorial frustrates. You can't move back and forth between tips and if you do something wrong, there's nothing to help you but a frozen screen. Also, the program places a very unwanted link to a casual game site on your PC. After loading, the game changes not only the resolution of the game window, but It also changes your monitor's resolution as well, making it a pain to find your desktop items. And you haven't even started the game yet.

The game suffers from poor graphics and the tiny, confusing dialog from characters that appears on the screen. They're trying to be helpful, yet the misspelled words and odd syntax is confusing. With text and still graphics, government advisors make suggestions on everything from mining to politics to research. To cut down on emissions, for instance, you can introduce a carbon tax. But, filled with statistics, bar graphs and no soul, Eco Tycoon is far too taxing in itself.