C64 ~ Sim City Review

Overview

If you've never been a mayor of a city, then have you ever wanted to "pretend" to be a mayor of a city? If you say "yes", read on. If you say "no", go away.

Gameplay

In Sim City, you get to play mayor of a city. When you start the game, you're given some money and a big hunk of land to start building your city. You get to manage the basic aspects of the day to day running of a city. Your ongoing activities include zoning residential, commercial and industry land blocks to be built on, laying down roads and providing electricity to everything. Building seaports and airports enhances your economy. Keep you people happy by keeping the pollution and traffic down, and build parks for the kids to play in.

The game starts off in the menu screen where you use your down and right cursor keys to move across the menu. Here you can select a variety of geographical maps to view like traffic intensity and pollution level. But you don't want to see that, you want to build your spastic city. To do that, select the edit option and push enter. From there on, do whatever you want. I've pretty much described everything you do in this game. It's really a matter of selecting what you want to shove into those grey areas. Then you wait for the funds to roll in so you can build some more. That's only if you plotted your building zones properly, something you won't be all that enthusiastic about doing. What would be better is to execute some disasters, including fires, earthquakes, tornadoes and the monster. Watch your already dead city suffer from an earthquake, fires, tornado and monster all at once.

2 out of 10

Graphics

There is very little in the way of graphics. It's evident that there has been nil attempt to make this game look like a game. The land is grey. Why not brown? All the buildings are just black boxes. Moving traffic are just black dots. There is no life in the city. Not a single breath of air seen for all that you see are black boxes. At least the water is blue and the trees are green.

1 out of 5

Sound and Music

The only sound effect I remember is the swishing sound when you switch from the menu screen to the edit screen. That's it. Listen to your marvellously muted city come to life.

0.25 out of 5

Difficulty

Snore bore. The game isn't difficult. It's getting yourself to play it that's difficult after you've figured out how to get into the game screen. Everything about getting into the game is difficult, only because you won't want to play it.

1.5 out of 5

Longevity

If you can stand the complete dullness of building a city, you may want to save it. Then you'll need to go into the disk access menu. You'll be crazy to load up your saved city to continue with it. I mean, the city is already dead. Get on with your own life. A better idea is to load up one of the pre-made cities, like Detroit or Boston. Do that so you can unleash some natural disasters on cities that deserve to be destroyed effectively letting you play God for 5 minutes. Gets old quick. Will you ever want to play this game ever again after doing that?

0.5 out of 5

For: the trees are green, the water is blue, natural disasters.

Against: sterile gameplay, no attempt to look like a city, no sounds, difficult to motivate yourself to play, pointless.

The original Sim City on the PC was a pretty good game. It had substance, it had purpose by being both fun and educational, it breathed life. This C64 version is an abomination.