SimCity

The Good
Ah, good ol’ SimCity. I remember sinking countless hours of my child years into this game. In fact, I can vividly remember avoiding my friends because they obviously wouldn’t want to sit and watch me play a game about building a city. I remember playing it so much that I stumbled upon a formula for building a successfully huge and hugely successful, if not monotonously designed, city. But I had a much longer attention span for games back then. This is probably because I had a much more limited selection, and had to wait for my parents to fork over the cash for a new one.

In case you don’t know, SimCity is a game about building cities. It’s one of the few console games of its era to have no defined end. You just build and build and build until your map is full. This may take you hours to do, depending on the map you start with. After that happens, well, I guess you could rearrange your lots in an attempt to improve your city or play the scenarios, but you’re more likely to just start a new one. It’s a very simple game that is a lot easier to understand than its successors.

So I built my city, the hapless city of Zomburg, on one of the island maps (532, to be precise) where there would be no escape. As I built up my city, I was marveled by how simple the game, in fact, was. If you took out the city style visuals of the game, it would basically just be a puzzle game. All the buildings and roads of the game are just various sized blocks that you must figure out how best to place them. The game doesn’t tell you that maybe building houses right next to factories would be a bad idea; you just kind of have to figure it out for yourself (or use common sense). It isn’t a particularly difficult game to understand, hell, even my child self was able to figure it out.

The visuals and atmosphere of the game are mostly pleasing. It’s nice to see the seasons change as time goes by, and the music is very calming, even if it does play on a loop, changing only at each city stage. It is sometimes difficult to make out what everything is supposed to be due to the low-resolution visuals. It took me the longest time to figure out that the tiny little things that build on new residential zones are houses.

The Bad
Can you guess what the people of Zomburg chose to complain to me about? No, it isn’t the lack of a bridge leaving town. They instead bothered me incessantly about high housing costs. Well excuuuse me, Zomburg. I’m sorry, but if you want to live in my utopian city, you’ll have to pay for it. What was worse about this was that I had no idea to fix the problem. To fix a high crime rate, you place police department. If you have traffic troubles, you place public transit. So to fix high housing costs I built factories in everyone’s neighbourhood, that’ll learn ‘em.

Well, actually, no it didn’t. Then they started complaining about pollution. There’s just no pleasing these people. It wouldn’t be a problem if I could just place pollution sucking sponges, or cheap housing modules, but I can’t. These are problems with no real visible solution. Some things just happen without any real reason. For example, why are the neighbourhoods located in beautiful downtown Zomburg, right across the street from the park, and down the road from a police station, turning into ghettos? Why is that road going to nowhere in particular crammed with traffic? Why are they asking me for more residential zones when they haven’t used the ones I’ve already given them?

It’s the lack of explanation that is most frustrating. Your assistant, Mr. Wright, isn’t very helpful, either. He often tells you that you have a problem and you need to fix it, but he won’t explain how. Maybe it’s more realistic to have people constantly harassing you to fix the most trivial problems, but I figured this game gave up on realism when it allowed you to have Bowser attack your city.

The Bottom Line
It’s worth noting that I have never played any of the other versions of SimCity, so I don’t know how it stacks up to, say, the DOS version. With that aside, SimCity is still as fun as it always was. I feel it even stands up well against its newer siblings. Its simplicity makes it easy to get into and enjoy. Sure, it can sometimes be frustrating, but you can always unleash your wrath on the city using a variety of disasters. Overall, I find SimCity to be an above-average game, or rather, an OKAY game. I fully recommend it if you own a SNES.

The Good
This is one great game - a classic in all respects. It was terribly innovative and completely original, and I still prefer it to the newer SimCity games (perhaps because the new ones are overly complex and slow).

It works like a charm on an EGA 286, and even the CGA version was cool (though very rare). The graphics were minimalistic but did their job, the management concept was excellent and the almost complete lack of sound effects is actually a good thing.

The Bad
Somewhat inconsistant AI and scoring system make this game an occasional nightmare, as you will sometimes find yourself running an extremely well-designed city only to have it fail miserably and die.

The Bottom Line
A real classic. Everyone knows this, and everyone should.

The Good
I loved this game, way back in the days where your pc struggled to even run plain tetris. It was great to have a game that spanned over more than 3 disks ;)

The concept of owning your own city, and managing it, building it, controlling the traffic and the little people. Oh we all aspire to be a God - how cool can ownage be! But yes, enough about my plan to take over the world. This game is very cool. The next up SimCity 2000 got quite complex when compared to this, and when you're young you don't want things to be TOO complex. So I came back to this game often.

You got to build residential, commercial and industrial zones, power and other city necessities. Airports and docks when your city got even bigger! The naughty little monsters, plus tornado's and other natural disasters. Meanwhile learning about taxes and education and health funding etc. I suppose you could call this game education if you wanted :P

The Bad
I think that once you did get the hang of SimCity 2000 it was hard to come back to this game. But in that place and time, this game was excellent. I still sometimes pull it out and play again. Its nice to have a game you can go back to. So I couldnt criticise it too much.

Sounds could do with an improvement. ;)

The Bottom Line
Totally groovy. A great classic that bought Maxis to my attention. The SimCity series as a whole is worth checking out. But you cant neglect this one - its cool!