lcs@remus.rutgers.edu (Lyle C. Seplowitz) (12/02/90)
I just purchased SimCity for the 64. I wanted to purchase it earlier, after playing it on a Mac, but hesitated because it doesn't have all the features and I had no idea what type of graphics it had. Even after I read the review in Compute!'s Gazette, I wasn't entirely convinced. Well, I recently reread that review and looked over the picture they printed. I finally convinced myself that that was Commodore graphics and bought the game. Compute!'s Gazette lied. They printed a picture of the IBM's screen, even after complaining about how companies are making quick ports. Instead, the reviewer praises Maxis Software for providing a specifically 64 manual. They had to give the 64 version its own manual, the other versions offer more features and look much better. I can't say I wasn't warned. The company does have a sticker that says that the game doesn't have all the features of the 16-bit versions. But I am disappointed in Maxis Software for downplaying the game for the 64. I don't mind that the graphics aren't very nice and there is hardly any sound, I would have overlooked these shortcomings if the game play was good. The game does play well, but the absence of some features makes it less interesting and less of a simulation. I know I will quickly tire of its limited control. It doesn't even support trains! Come on, they are my favorite! Enough of the opinions, here is what the game is about... In SimCity, you play mayor and it is your responsibility to built, maintain, and keep the Sims happy (the people who live there--sound familiar, maybe like Little Computer People, well it is my belief, that when LCP leave their house, SimCity is where they go--its the only logical alternative). Being mayor is a big responsibility. You start with a barron piece of land (except for trees and rivers) and you build upward from there. Adding roads is simple and cheap. Before building can be done, you must zone an area for a particular type of building. SimCity allows for three types of zoning, Residential, Commercial, and Industrial. Once you zone and area, the Sims will do the actual building on that site. How much building is done depends on how proportionately you zone areas. The Sims need places to work and shop, so don't forget the zone industrial and commercial areas. Too many industrial areas can result it heavy pollution. Before anything can be built, however, you must built a power plant. This is costly, $2000, half the money you start out with. But you will have plenty to start building a small city. With the taxes you collect (yes, the Sims have to pay taxes too) you will get more money to expand your city. Every building has to be connected to the power plant via power lines. The screen quickly gets cluttered with roads, buildings, and power lines, just like a real city. Periodically, you should check your cities statistics. Switching to the full map view (the building area is approximately 10 miles x 10 miles, a small section of which is displayed in building mode), you have access to the population density, land value, pollution density, layout of roadways, powerlines, and waterways (missing from this is the crime density--something that is very real in cities and shouldn't have been eliminated). You can also view graphs of your population, commercial, industrial, standards of living, and employment growth. I found that the graph section is better implemented on the 64 then on the monochrome Mac in which the graphs become cluttered and hard to read. The 64 version lets you select which graphs to display and overlays it one as you select it. Also missing from this version is the opinion polls. I remember from the Mac version that you can view opinion polls of how the Sims thought you were doing. Too bad they felt this wasn't an important feature...I always feel like I don't have enough feedback from the people. Graphs can only tell you so much. Eventually you will want to expand you city. You can build seaports and even airports, if you have $4000. However, there are a few things that you can't do in the 64 version. You can't build fire and police departments. You can't built a football stadium, and you can't have trains! (You can tell I'm disappointed about the trains). You can also build parks, which apparently have suffered from recently inflation since version 1.0 which the manual states cost $40, but in version 1.1 they acutally cost $50! Once you have built your dream city, you can have some fun and destroy it! There is a disaster menu that includes, fire, tornadoe, monster (Godzilla!), and earthquake. Missing again is flash flood and air crash. Air crash is easy to implement, the planes are only sprites. Maxis provides some sample cities (8) on disk that you can save. They have made games out of them so you can set up a disaster, like the great San Francisco earthquake of 1909 (which is another feature the 64 version lacks, the ability to select and show dates) in which you start an earthquake and then have to rebuilt your city. All of this sounds good, and it is good. Except I still feel cheated and like I have less responsibility in my cities. The layout of the program is very different from all the other versions (the nice 3D graphics that you see on the back of the package, the 64 version is nothing like that, 2D, mono colored things. The only differences in color are trees (green), rivers (blue), paved, buildable areas (gray) and buildings (black). Which reminds me, I forgot to mention the bulldozer, which is how to plow away unfavorable land to get it ready for building. You can also have roads that cross the water (i.e. bridges) as well as powerlines that cross water). The screen is laid out with all the icons at the bottom instead of on the side. I believe, all the graphics are high resolution redefined characters, except the full map screen and graphs which are probably multi-color mode graphics screens. The control is somewhat awkward and annoying. Options from the menu are selected using the cursor keys, thankfully you don't have to use the shift key, the left keys moves left and the right key moves right. Pressing return selects that option. In the full map's main menu, moving is slow because the map is updated with a different density each time you move the cursor box. I would have been better to only update the map when you press return. To be fair, the updates are incrediable fast, but it still slows you down when you want to return to the building map. To make up for the lack of features, Maxis includes the terrain editor as part of the package, which costs extra (about $20) with other versions. I hope the other versions has better terrain editors, because this one is difficult to use. Instead of giving you a pointer cursor to give you some direction on where you will place items (large rivers, small rivers, large trees, and small trees are the options), instead you have this large box which places items it is upper corner. It is very difficult and you can't zoom in, which make careful editing impossible. Thanks for including it Maxis, I wouldn't have wanted to pay extra for it, but I'll probably never use it. I used it once to make the river bigger to better accomidate my sea port (yes, you can use the editor while you have a city going--but if you overwrite a piece of your city with, say, a tree, it is gone for good). So what does all this add up to? SimCity is such an excellent game that even on the 64 it is enjoyable. However, its shortcomings do hinder its overall playability to a level that gives me a mixed feeling about the game. If you really like how this sounds and don't mind the lacking features, then you will like SimCity for the 64. If you like the idea behind the game, but your disappointed by the shortcomings, don't bother with this 64 game, pass it by. (The ideas expressed in this article are completely my own opinions and are not to be taken any other way.) If anyone has any comments, or owns SimCity and feels contrary to my review, please post about it.
tjlee@iastate.edu (Lee Thomas Jennings) (12/02/90)
My roommate last year had SimCity, and I played the game for a while, but then I graduated and don't have access to it anymore. I mostly liked it. The big drawback I saw, since I've never used the Mac or IBM version or anything, was that I couldn't tell how much actual time was passing. There is no day or night in SimCity, and even the graphs have no time scale (no vertical axis label either) to tell you what the little dots represent. All you can see is whether something has gone up or gone down recently. -- Tom Lee, "The Lamplighter" BITNET: TAB47@ISUVAX * Central Institute for the Sciences * Internet: tjlee@iastate.edu * Abbenay, Anarres, Tau Ceti or: tab47@ccvax.iastate.edu * * * Gentleness is strength. * * *