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.