Tropico 3

To my amazement, when playing the X360 version of Tropico 3, I found myself finally getting into the true details that make this game click.  This coming after trying several times to get into the PC version and never making it much past the second island.  I found the PC version to be clunky and pretty much unresponsive when comparing it to many of the games of this ilk on the same platform.  What makes the 360 version superior is ts that Kalypso had to streamline a lot of the commands when mapping everything to the controller.
 
The fact that your "dictator," depending on how you play it, has faults that you have to deal with makes for some moments of comic gold.  I found myself chuckling at the reactions of the various factions when I decided to play supreme dictator, having the rebellious tropicans discretely killed in an accident or throwing hapless mothers into prison for no reason; and this is the crux of what makes this game so enjoyable.  I just wish that there was more of this that I could deal with and the first 5-10 years on each campaign weren't a race to get to get certain key buildings built so that I could have the money to build an empire without having to worry about  a military coup or rebellion every 2-3 minutes.
 
This is where the game starts to fall apart, along with some serious bugs that I encountered; one the caused me to lose 5 hours of gameplay  that I still haven't gone back to play from sheer frustration.  In the end, I sunk almost 60-70 hours of time into this game within 2 weeks and that says a lot about a game.  I would not have done that if the basics to the game weren't intrinsically fun, because they are.  It is just a shame the outer package that this game is wrapped in with its mechanics does not live up to what I really wanted it to be.  Every island devolved into the same plan except for Viva Tropico -- which is still one mission that I have not managed to beat -- and I kept on thinking of how I would love to have Sim City polish and detail within this game and it would be golden.
 
All in all, it is a game that I hope more people play, as I know too many will not even give it a chance.  It doesn't help that it is practically impossible to find everywhere besides Amazon and a specialty shop in which I found it.  No major brick-and-mortar retailer has it, and I fear they never will.  A shame really, when this game proves that this genre can work very well on the 360.