When shooters go bad, at least you have the fun of blasting away with noisy weapons and creating a ruckus. But when an RTS strays from the golden path, it is no fun at all.

Sometimes a game is so painful, so irritating to slog through, that reviewers take an almost evil glee in ripping the effort in print. They pile on and try to out-do each other in clever puns and put-downs. The words pour out and the review writes itself as the pejoratives spill forth. Pax Romana comes close to that level. It's such an ambitious undertaking, however, that I can't completely gut it and show the readers its still-beating heart.

Lord knows I want to. I've rarely met a game with so many painful pieces to it. The interface is a mess, there are typos in the manual and the tutorials have invisible icons that prevent you from finishing. The fonts sometimes become unreadable, the menus change names, and the gameplay is almost an afterthought. If I didn't take this job seriously, I would have given up and tossed it in the trash heap.

Instead, I am holding it hostage as a lecture aid to show students what not to do.

Let's talk about what the game is supposed to be - an interactive lesson in ruling Rome circa 272 BC, during a good time for the empire, when the world knew peace, Roman style. Once the patches are completed and the incredible complexity is resolved, players should be able to maneuver factions in the Senate for important votes, manage the provincial economies, command armies, and try to make Emperor before another faction seizes power.

If you liked Europa Universalis but wanted to spend more time in the Roman baths cajoling reluctant allies, this is your game. The Risk-style map will remind you of EU, and in truth Pax was designed by the EU creators. But I can't think of another game that was so intricate and unsatisfying with its management. By the time I stopped playing I was hungry for the old three-resource, wood-stone-gold style. Or maybe just spice, as in the Dune series.

Pax Romana forces contestants to consider every nuance of such variables as justice, economics, warfare, diplomacy, elections and stratagems. It's all too much, in my opinion. And I have supporters. Those who have bothered to log in to the developer's support site have demanded a patch for the bugs, so far to no avail. Although an initial fix was due in December 2003, it still wasn't ready by press time in mid-January 2004. The online multiplayer signups are seemingly devoid of activity, and this title seems headed for the bargain bin without intervention.

Here's how I knew there would be trouble: The installation offered to load up DirectX 8 - it's always a bad sign when the game comes out a version behind the current standard. My installation locked up and I had a mouse that got stuck; I tried replacing my USB mouse with a PS/2 unit, but that didn't help. I gave it a two-day timeout and re-installation, then resumed, and it let me proceed to the tutorials.

Anytime I tried to ALT-ESC out to check e-mail or type snide comments into a Word doc, Pax froze solid quickly. I did it anyway a couple times, just to be cruel.

Here's a major design flaw:Tthe tutorial information box is slightly transparent and sits on top of the relevant information. It isn't intuitive that the information box moves if you right-click and drag it out of the way. It sits right where it shouldn't. Ugh.

Worse, there are times when you need to click on something outside the main area and as you move the mouse, the map shifts on you.

The stern-looking 19-year-old Courelius Serpio is the only option for playing each tutorial, but you have to go through the motions of selecting him each time. The end of each lesson dumps you to the main tutorial selection screen when you finish, even though the natural thing to do is start the next lesson immediately. It took me a lot of time and a lot of courage to complete the entire tutorial, but every time I tried to jump into the game without finishing the training, I felt lost. That is one steep learning curve.

Some of the writing seems to have proofing, completion or translation issues. There are a couple of commands that tell you, "When you feel done, click the XXX and close the window." Nice use of a placeholder, but the implication is that the title just wasn't quite ready when it got rushed out to the world.

Elsewhere, you're instructed to click the minor taxation rate, but you can only click the max (30%) to get out of the screen. Tricky - perhaps a political statement about corrupt administrations or something similar?

There were these gems in the manual:

"The motion passed: it has received a majority of YES votes, counting abstentions as useless votes (i.e., abstaining is not voting yes, but is not voting no, either)." (p. 22)

"If the people of Rome is too much displeased with your management of the Republic, he may riot to revolution and slaughter you and your fellow Senators, leading to collective defeat of all political factions." (p. 23)

With a decent scrub, a little less complexity and more concentration on fun, this title has a chance to be called a game, and not a punishment. Until then, if you get some kind of serious Roman monkey on your back, rent Caligula or Gladiator. This one needs to age a bit more.