Xref: utzoo comp.sys.amiga:34537 comp.sys.mac:32652 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!agate!shelby!polya!ali From: ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.mac Subject: SimCity Message-ID: <9534@polya.Stanford.EDU> Date: 29 May 89 03:37:06 GMT Sender: Ali T. Ozer Reply-To: aozer@NeXT.com Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga Distribution: na Organization: . Lines: 54 Ok, so you have a whole 3 day weekend with a million things you can be doing and you can't decide between them. Solution? Go get SimCity. My wife and I innocently picked up SimCity yesterday (Saturday) morning at a local dealer. Our intentions were to look around and not buy anything, but they had SimCity, it was inexpensive ($31), and we remembered reading something about it in Newsweek, so we said "oh let's just get it," mostly out of curiousity. Well, we've been at it all last night and all today. Is it fun! It's similar to Empire in that it's a highly addictive game of strategy. In Empire you try to conquer an alien planet, in SimCity you try to build and maintain a city. You can either choose a prebuilt scenario (some sort of disaster in an existing city) or try to build your own city from ground up. We've mostly tried the latter; boy is it addictive. You decide where to put different types of zones (residential, commercial, industrial), how to most efficiently lay out power lines and roads, how to take best advantage of existing landscape, and so on. Sims (the people) move in and out, and parts of the city become slums while other parts prosper. You build beautiful bridges and roads and surround them with parks and houses just to find that five years later the traffic is intolerable and you have to tear stuff down. When the city is large enough you can build airports, seaports, and stadiums; each has disadvantages and advantages. Airplanes come crashing down in the middle of the city, stadiums cause massive traffic jams, etc. But without them your city will never grow beyond a certain point. You have to watch out for the polls; the Sims are constantly evaluating you. You also have to find the delicate balance in the budget and keep the taxes tolerable while trying to maintain your roads and police and fire departments, all necessary. Pollution is another problem that can quickly turn into a difficult-to-reverse nightmare; you have to make sure to avoid concentrating too much industry in one location... Anyway, you get the point. It suffices to say we played eight hours straight today and had to tear ourselves from the program just to eat. I imagine most people will find similar enjoyment in the program. The program crashed twice; both in the first half hour of play. You can save/restore cities, so we started doing that often, and for some reason it hasn't crashed since. The program also gets confused sometimes; but it seems to recover after a few seconds and it happens rarely enough such that it hasn't been a problem. The graphics are great --- They look real nice, and, best of all, they animate --- you see little cars moving along the roads, planes take off/land, buildings appear/disappear, and so on. The program is also fast, even when the city gets large. We have the Amiga version; but it's supposed to be out for the Macintosh as well, and I imagine it's equally fun. Highly recommended. I imagine it easily rivals Indiana Jones in fun factor. Ali Ozer