Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!agate!shelby!polya!ali From: ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Short games review (SimCity) Message-ID: <10629@polya.Stanford.EDU> Date: 15 Jul 89 15:27:04 GMT References: <20573@bikini.cis.ufl.EDU> <1573@marvin.Solbourne.COM> <9609@fluke.COM> Sender: Ali T. Ozer Reply-To: ali@polya.stanford.edu (Ali Ozer) Distribution: usa Organization: . Lines: 33 In article <9609@fluke.COM> mce@tc.fluke.COM (Brian McElhinney) writes: >The game [SimCity] itself is amazing and addictive. They do know how to >write an entertaining city simulator. They don't know how to write Macintosh >software (as I understand it they are "really" Amiga programmers; still I >can't believe how bad 1.1c is; surely the Amiga handles mouse events >correctly). The Amiga version suffers from a similar set of problems, especially with the mouse & user interface. It's nearly impossible to drag out roads and power lines, for instance. The right mouse is always used for menus on the Amiga; but they took the liberty of making it bulldoze if you're not on the menu bar, which sometimes means you inadvertently bulldoze. They use two screens (one for detailed map, other for graphs) that slide up and down and can be pushed back to front, however the menu is available only on one of the screens. The program also have some memory problems; it has trouble starting up on machines with 512K chip memory if you have more than 2 floppies, for instance. They did some things right --- the Amiga version uses 64 colors, and correctly goes down to 32 on the earlier versions of A1000s. It multitasks correctly, as well, and except for the road/power line dragging, is reasonably fast even on my 68000 Amiga. Let's just hope the upgrade fixes the other problems... I hear there are some differences in the game play between the Amiga & Mac versions --- almost as if the development was done in parallel but separately --- for instance, a PD costs $1000 on the Amiga but only $500 on the Mac? If you're playing the "easy" level on the Amiga you never get disasters (except plane & ship crashes), while you apparently get floods & such on the easy level of the Mac version? Strange... Ali