A conspiracy theorist's wet dream, Floor 13 casts you as the head of a shadowy governmental department tasked with keeping your paymasters in power. Not by issuing spin or harassing newspaper editors, though - the methods you get to employ are far more sinister. From your tastefully decorated team you can have people followed, interrogated, smeared, abducted and even killed.     You receive one or two reports a day detailing a scandal brewing that, even if it's not immediately obvious why, could damage the government's reputation. You then have to assign the appropriate teams to dig a little deeper. A typical scenario may have you having a suspect watched to discover his accomplices, and then having them discreetly removed. The scenarios are randomly generated so the game is different every time you play it.

Now the bloodthirsty among you might be wondering why you can't go around assassinating or kidnapping everyone who badmouths the government. Firstly, the higher profile a suspect is, the longer it takes to have him bumped off. If you don't give your squads enough time to prepare a plan of action, they bungle the attempt and the target may escape with his life. Similarly, you can't abduct all the suspects you encounter - MPs are by and large too high profile to nab, so another approach is needed. And while you get more and more people assigned to you as the game progresses, you initially only have a few teams working in the department. So assigning a death squad to every member of the opposition is, sadly, out of the question.

It's not just the government's interests you have out for - you're also a member of a secret masonic order known as the 'Masters Of Thoth' who will, from time to time, ask you to protect or aid one of their number. Trying to keep both them and the government happy is quite a juggling act. I ended up just ignoring their requests, because while there's no consequences if you fail to complete their tasks, should you let the government drop too low in the polls, you will end up being fired. And that's the nice way of leaving your job. The other way is rather less pleasant, and occurs when your actions become too high profile -  a burly mafioso comes to your office and hurls you out of the window. So you do need to be a little discrete about your department's activities.

Floor 13 has aged surprisingly well - not least because the game cleverly refers to the political parties as 'us' and 'them' rather than specifying any particular party. And it's hugely enjoyable to play. Even though the game is entirely make believe - I hope - there's a lot to fun to be had from lording it over your potential victims. Not to mention the satisfaction you get from successfully averting a scandal. The graphics might not look that great by today's standards, but they don't need to be that good, since the game's real pull is the power it gives you. The only real criticism I can level at Floor 13 is that because the scenarios are randomly generated, you'll eventually find yourself coming up against scenarios you've already faced, only with the names of the suspects changed. But this does at least give you the chance try a new approach, maybe if your original attempts at containing the scandal came a cropper. Floor 13 can't be bought due to its age, but it can be found on many 'abandonware' sites and is well worth checking out if you've ever wanted to run the country without all that messy business of having to be voted in.  Great stuff - though of course no such organisation exists in real life. Right?