Quick Look: Sim City

January 19, 2010 | By Admin In Technology |

When I was younger, there was a virtual reality game that took the world by storm. It was a completely unique concept, unlike anything that had come across our computer screens in the past. The basic concept was that you were the mayor of a brand new town. You have to budget the town’s resources in order to promote growth and prosperity, while simultaneously fighting off the occasional disaster. Everything from zoning and construction to roads and even that inevitable shrine to yourself is left to your discretion. That game, SimCity, would eventually give rise to an entire genre of Sim-based games, right up to the latest rendition of The Sims 3. Through all of these various updates and variations, though, I have always been partial to the original Sim City game, so I was pretty excited to find that original game in the iTunes app Store.

To get started, all you need to do is setup the parameters for your city. That essentially means giving it a name and deciding how much seed money you are going to get to start with. In easy mode, you start with $50,000 for initial construction costs. In medium, you will only receive $20,000. Hard mode leaves you in the whole, starting with negative $10,000. If you do not want to start from scratch, though, you can also choose one of two starter cities, which are already up and growing, ready for you to jump right in and take charge.

Finally, if this is your first rodeo (uhm…city) then you will want to check out the Tutorial for sure. The game can get pretty complex and the tutorial (which is taught by your City Planner), does a great job of getting you started and teaching the various elements of a successful city.

One of the really cool things about Sim City is that every game is entirely new. Each new game generates a unique terrain. So, you never know whether you will have a lake off to one side of the town, or a river running through it. You can even customize the terrain by increasing or decreasing the amount of trees and water.

Now that you have the terrain set, you are ready to get started designing your town. Virtually anything you would find in a real town can be added to your Sim City, including:

residential areas
business districts
industrial parks
utilities
town resources
emergency workers
monuments

Heck, like the original game, you can even build natural (and not so natural disasters into things. Though I was disappointed to find that my favorite old time feature, attack of the Godzilla monster, did not make it into this version. Still, the inclusion of a poison gas cloud and alien invasion (to name a few) go a long way toward making up for the loss of Godzilla.

Adding any building zones or other features to your city is as easy as dragging and dropping. I was really quite impressed by how easy it was to control.

Additionally, the menus (this is a very menu driven game) are all extremely easy to navigate and intuitive. which is good since everything is based on pictures and icons, rather than words and text. Across the bottom of the screen, you will also find a scroll containing the latest news or some tips from your city staff.

In addition to viewing and maintaining your city, there are also plenty of stats you can view to see how you are doing. Of course, the most important one is how much money your town is making, but you can also view growth charts for your city, health and fitness reports, and even talk to your advisors about your next move.

When I was in college (and earlier), SimCity was one of my favorite computer games. So, I was thrilled to find this little bit of nostalgia available for my iPod Touch (or your iPhone). I will say that the screen felt a little small to really experience the game the way it was intended, but the ability to pinch zoom went a long way toward remedying that problem (below is a zoomed in view of the same screen as above).

I also really liked the on screen controls, which put everything you need under a convenient and collapsible menu. The controls gelled well with the iPhone interface generally, while remaining unobtrusive and out of the way when you were working with other areas in the game. While I will admit that the Sim franchise has evolved well beyond SimCity, and my interest in the game was purely nostalgia, it was a piece of nostalgia which I was happy to see and thoroughly enjoyed.

SimCity is available from EA Games for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store.

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