August 23, 1991 — SimCity

I’m more of a SimTower kind of guy, but I’ve always enjoyed the Sim series.

Originally released in 1989, SimCity was a launch title for the Super Nintendo by Nintendo, despite being developed by Maxis.

I’m surprised, but shouldn’t be, to find another launch title that likely required reading the manual before diving in. I really just want to dive in and get to building my city. I slap down a bunch of everything available, residential, commercial, and industrial sectors, connecting them with roads and power lines, and growth begins.

I know eventually, the city-building genre got way too complex and is almost the sole territory of certified city planners, but it’s still fun to tinker around with… until things begin to go wrong and then I can’t really be bothered to sort out taxation and police presence.

To be fair, I recently played about two hours of Cities: Skyline and ran into a nearly identical problem in this game that’s three decades old. My town starts to grow, and then it doesn’t. I could just keep building more and more sectors but after the first couple of nice, tidy neighbourhoods, it seems a little dry.

It’s almost the testing ground to find out which kids are going to be city planners. Sit down a child in from on the 1989 SimCity and if they ask your advice about mass transit or municipal budgets, you might have a city planner on your hands.

Another game billed ‘one of the greatest video games of all time,’ but I’m going to disagree. SimTower is a work of art, with it’s mind-numbing placement of condo after condo, and the sound track of elevators moving. While mildly amusing and innovative for its time, even after playing the tutorial, I’m not really sure what I could be doing better.

Apparently, Nintendo released the game and added a few ideas of their own, including replacing the Godzilla-style disaster with Bowser.

Total play time: 2 hours.