SimCity Phenomena

1990 KevätI have hardly ever heard of a city whose residents were satisfied with the people running it. Thoughts often tread the path of "(swear word) (descriptive adjective and noun), the affairs of this city too have gone to (swear word) again. Even I could run them better." Talk is cheap, but in Maxis Software's SimCity you can put your utopias to the test.

SimCity is a town-planning simulator, which as a concept falls into the same excitement bracket as hymn-singing contests. In practice it's another matter: this is one of those games that fill the night with red eyes.

The bit-mayor has two choices: either load a ready-made scenario or build their own little city from scratch.

The difference is mainly that the ready-made scenarios deal with a big city that has fallen into the clutches of a disaster, and the player usually has five years to get it back on its feet. Having survived the realistic "Tokyo in the clutches of Godzilla", you might try, say, the utopian "San Francisco earthquake". For reasons I'd rather not go into, after one attempt I haven't dared try "Boston's nuclear reactor going pop".

The other option is to build your city from scratch all by yourself. The idea is to bring about a growing, expanding city whose budget stays in the black and whose residents stay more or less content.

In the Amiga version, running the city is handily done with the mouse, with the building blocks hanging at the edge of the screen. The bottom edge takes you to the second screen, i.e. the statistics department. The PC also has mouse control, but you get along quite nicely with the keyboard too. On the C-64 the menus get selected with the joystick.

The city's main building blocks are residential, commercial and industrial plots, with which the player zones the map. If all goes well, hypothetical people start building on them. Housing types range from, say, slums to posh neighbourhoods, with the same principle applied to commerce and industry as well.

For power generation you have to build a power station, running either on coal or on atoms. Then you run the cables so the power distribution works. You also have to build the road and rail network yourself. On the C-64 the railways have been replaced with water pipes.

Other things to build are the seaports and airports that commerce and industry demand, police stations to stamp out crime and fire stations to keep fires under control. And people usually start whining for a football stadium just when the budget is showing rather small sums.

SimCity revolves around the budget. Taxes have to be set high enough for money to flow into the city coffers, but not so high that people start evacuating to cheaper cities. Maintaining the transport routes and the police and fire departments costs money, which is worth bearing in mind while you're waving the mouse about. At the end of each year you get the figures on taxes collected, residents who have moved and other matters of interest.

Information on pollution, crime, traffic and whatnot is nicely available in graphical form. You can even commission a Gallup poll to find out what the hoi polloi are grumbling about.

As the city grows, you have to battle such strange monsters as crime, traffic jams and pollution. But a thriving city also has a whole bunch of proper disasters in store for it. The earth may tremble, the nuclear reactor may go kablooey, fires may break out here and there, a tornado or else a flood may strike, or Godzilla himself may even be born as the child of excessive pollution. Usually, though, the worst that happens is a ship crashing into a bridge or a plane dropping onto the city, and proper disasters are hardly ever seen in a normal game.

As such, there isn't much difference between the disasters. They all destroy buildings, start fires and mess up the power distribution, but an earthquake, for one, doesn't leave any cracks in the ground behind it. Their duration also causes mild puzzlement. A fire, for example, can rage for years of game time, and the same goes for the others.

SimCity claims to use genuine, real formulas when calculating the city's development, which adds to the game's charm. The most unrealistic thing about SimCity is the enormous interest in developing, growing and improving one's own city. That's by no means how it is in real life.

No rose without a thorn. There could have been twice as many building blocks. Waterworks, sewers, metros, proper highways - there's the start of the list. More generally, the player should have a more precise way of influencing things, say by breaking up traffic jams with road signs on the streets. And as always, at some point the game turns tedious when nothing much seems to be happening.

In its technical execution SimCity lurches from one extreme to the other. On the one hand the graphics have nice little tricks, such as microscopic footballers romping about the stadium and car parks filling up during the football season; on the other, strangely flickering, stiffly animated sprites and slowish scrolling. Despite its blemishes, though, the graphics work, as does the mouse-controlled play.

Bad points notwithstanding, SimCity is a truly excellent and original game that brings on a hefty dose of the familiar addiction phenomenon. Playing SimCity ought to be compulsory for many a clown politician. Hopefully a PC version will come out too, so the PCs in Parliament would get some useful work to do.