jepullia@copper.ucs.indiana.edu (John Pulliam) (11/08/90)
As a pre-review of SimEarth (I spent a few hours goofing around with a beta test version, as a friend of my wife is in the beta test group), I offer the following. Please take note: I am not in any way, shape or form 8-) a computer scientist... so don't expect to read the word 'elegant' anywhere, or to hear about how it interacts well with the left-handed widget architecture of a Mac 747. 8-) I'm just going to tell you what (little) I know about the game/experiment. It kind of has the feel of SimCity, although it's a very different game. The deal is, you are 'God'; able to control the geothermal, solar, atmospheric, and biological conditions of your 'planet'. You can also alter the planet's terrain, although the wind, sea and tectonics may change it right back to the way it was before over the course of time. Your goal is to develop intelligent, advanced life forms. The game divides all life forms into steps, or levels, of evolution (that is, all micro-organisms and fauna; flora plays a terrain role, but it's not part of your goal to attempt the development of self-aware trees 8-). There are 12-20 levels (I can't remember the exact number), including two or three levels of micro-life (protozoids is one of them), then crustaceans, fish, cestaceans, amphibs, reptiles, avians, mammals, and four to six levels of "intelligent" life forms (once you succeed in getting a species to self-awareness, it begins to develop through the stone, bronze, industrial, atomic, etc. ages). Like SimCity, there is no real "end" to the game (that I'm aware of); just continual experimentation and playing around to see how well you can do. Also like SimCity, it has more the feel of a science experiment than a pure game. Without the documentation, and given the short time I tried SimEarth out, I never really grasped all the complex relationships between the things you can control and the development of the life forms. I can draw a few conclusions, though: every time I messed with the geothermal/atmospheric/sea/biological/solar conditions _drastically_, I had a very tough time developing advanced life forms (maybe the underlying message is that our ecosystem is in delicate balance...). The one and only time I was able to develop senscient (sp?) life, it was birds/avians (kind of cool to watch bird tribes run around the board settling new areas and fighting, etc). Oh, that's another similiarity to SimCity; there are disasters which occur randomly (war, famine, flood, volcano, earthquake, hurricane); I don't know if, as in SimCity, they occur more frequently if you do certain things, or less frequently under other conditions. I would assume there are relations between most of them and the input you give (esp. volcanoes/ hurricanes/earthquakes/floods; you should be able to control the frequency and intensity using your input, if you know how; I didn't). War and famine are subject to the level of advancement of your life forms and the terrain they're in; you can't control war (except by "getting" them into a more advanced stage, I suppose), but famine is a function of their local terrain, which can be somewhat controlled. The game is in full 256-color (I think; at least it has _very_ nice graphics), and uses the macro-micro "map" exchange system of SimCity. You toggle on/off any of the overlays (natural disasters, prevailing winds and seas, sea/wind temps, life form locations and densities, etc.), and you also have access to many graphs (change in temps over time, change in Methane/CO2/Oxygen contents over time, etc). Very well done graphics and use of the mouse and other controls, IMO (you'll wish your screen was bigger after playing this, no matter how big a screen you've got, because you can have multiple maps/graphs/screens displayed at once, and will want/need to). The game's opening screens offer several options (you can start with a clean earth, or several already-partly-developed options, kind of like SimCity) for play. I think one of the options is even "solve the smog (or ozone) problem in 1990 Earth", or some such. Other options let you limit the variables (one's called the "aquarium" option, can't remember the name of the other one). Anyway, a lot of interesting "encyclopedia" type info is included when starting up these options (like when the earth first started to cool, when life first began, etc.). I didn't find any bugs, to my knowledge (found some disturbing problems, like inability to make certain screens show certain data when they should have been able to, etc., but those problems may be the result of my lack of knowledge, not having read the documentation). The game will be a dynamite addition to your game/semi-game collection; I don't know about the $70 price tag, but maybe it's even worth that. Sorry I can't give you more on the technical (comp sci) side in this review; hope this helps those of you who are interested. John Pulliam