SimCity

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Original box art.

SimCity is an city simulation game by developed and published by Maxis and first released on Commodore 64 in February 1989, and later ported to over a dozen other platforms. This is the first game in the Sim series and became hugely popular with many sequels and games made in other mediums like a board game and card game.

You play the newly elected mayor of an empty plot of land, and it is your job to plan out a thriving city including the roads, zones, and electiricity. To do this you must factor in where people like to live, work, and shop, control crime and pollution, and manage disasters. Like a lot of the early Sim games, SimCity is more of a toy than a game.

Personal

My first experience with a SimCity title was the SNES port which is my favorite because it's more a game which challenges you finish scenarios, reach goals, and rewards you as you play better. However, my cousin got the DOS port, so I played it quite a bit as well. I've played a couple of the other ports too, each has their own minor tweaks to it. I think the later Window port is probably the best.

Status

I don't own this game, and it is not beatable.

Review

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6 6 5 2 8

Best Version: Windows

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

  • The game is very intricate, requiring the player to juggle all sorts of things at once including electricity, crime, pollution, traffic, taxes, and more. And many of the problems have multiple solutions. This is a min-maxer's paradise.
  • Seeing the zones increase in size and complexity as they become more populated is a very nice graphic trick which easily lets the player know how well they're doing.
  • For most ports, the game takes advantage of high-resolution graphics to give the player as much information as possible, and the mouse-driven iconographic user interface is very intuitive.
  • The better ports include scenarios which give you actual goals to achieve.
  • Being able to cause disasters at will and see how your city responds to them is a lot of fun.
  • Throughout the game's popularity, it kept getting ported to newer operating systems, and additional features were added each time. This made it far more accessible than most games of the time.
  • The manual is very comprehensive and even includes an essay on the importance and complexity of urban planning!
  • Some versions supported printing your city to a poster.

Bad

  • The units are pretty limited, so after the first half-hour of playing, you've pretty seen everything the game has to offer. It would have been nice to see a lot more variety in them, even if they didn't affect the game, just to let the player customize things more.
  • Most ports have no music and pretty awful audio. A little work could have been put toward giving the game a couple tunes.

Ugly

  • Nothing.

Media

Box Art

Documentation

Videos

Game play - Commodore 64.
Game play - DOS.

Titles

Language Native Transliteration Translation
English SimCity
English (re-release) SimCity Classic
English (working title) Micropolis
Japanese シムシティ ShimuShiti SimCity

Links

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