SimCity

SimCity description

Sometimes I wonder how much we lose by not being able to look at things with the eye of a discoverer. We will not be surprised in the wonder of the phone, we're not impressed "arrival of a train", but once the live picture was something from area of fairy tales! Even former symbols of progress - car or plane - we are unlikely to impress. So this exhibit is also... "banal urban simulation". Is it possible to go back in a time when the genre had no name - for the simple reason that was presented only this game? When the idea of building roads, houses, power plants and ports and airports on the computer screen was still fresh and original? Well, it's not easy, but you can try!

Thus, the court of 1989. Personal computer home is, "Wow! Are you an engineer?". A computer game is a curious oddity of a view: "Wow! And show?". Man is able to drag up any monochrome checkers just because he has a thinking machine. Booming in the world of Super Mario (the man runs, jumps, music there!), people play text quests with almost no pictures (the book hero, you!), but sixteen colors is pretty nice. About the Soviet Union generally keep quiet, here the weight is known, except slot machines. Your humble servant goes to kindergarten and is ready to play for hours with bulky domestic calculator at moms at work.

And then in selling it appears. SimCity, game God-sim (that's another thing: a couple of years will be the first RTS Dune II, so it is also God-mom baptized. God's harvesters. Heh...). On the screen we see the earth, forest, water. All clear, beautiful and recognizable. Left the clear control panel: click on the "road" are the cursor around the map, and the road is built! Click on the "wire"... hmm... and then there's the power is. You can do that usually in the city hall, for example, creation of transport and energy infrastructure, create parks, to lay out land for commercial, industrial and residential development (these three zones are marked respectively in blue, yellow and green colors - the color legend will live until the present day). What exactly will be built on the plots - will decide for themselves the invisible people (depending on the level of crime, road traffic and proximity of other buildings). First, you will only see small houses, then, if the city is to grow, houses will rise to skyscrapers. To the requirements of the inhabitants must be listened to, and the graphics will always show what type of development is now needed the most. In addition, the city needs the police and the fire service: high crime rates are not controlled by anyone fires anything good neither the city nor the mayor did not ensue. Over time, people will ask for an expensive stadium, the industry – ports and Railways, and Commerce – airport. The construction and maintenance of structures draws money from the funds of the city which are funded only in one way: taxes on property. Taxes can be raised at any time, just don't get carried away - people will scatter. It should be noted that not all buildings will be available initially: a new game begins in 1901, so don't be surprised if you just can't build an airport or nuclear power station. They will invent later. Happen in the city and disaster: a fire, a flood, the tornado will fly, the plane will fall. But really you can only influence the speed of extinguishing fires (it depends on the efficiency of the fire service), so much of the disaster will be reduced to damage control. But in the court of 2000, the city turned into a huge metropolis, the most terrible trouble which is not a budget, and constantly emerging traffic jams on the roads of the little blue machines. What the mayor's next? Have you noticed the menu DISASTERS (catastrophe) at the top? Yes, even SimCity is not a pure simulator of God, but something divine available to us. So, bored the mayor can make the city a few arson, cause a tornado or earthquake. And if it becomes quite boring, can be lifted from the nearest river the Godzilla and watch as he crawls through the city, a radical way of solving the problem of traffic jams. Sometimes it's a mesmerizing spectacle no less urban.

Purpose as such in the game, and to win it is impossible. However, there is provided a time-limited scenario with a certain task (this will also take on Board subsequent series). It looks like this: here you have the city of Detroit in 1972, here's the problem, "crime and industrial stagnation" and the task "to solve these problems for twenty years." Depending on your results by the end of the term the computer will decide whether you win or lose. Most of the cities here, the real, the events are divided equally between the real and the fantastic. So the bombing of Hamburg in 1944 and the earthquake in San Francisco are juxtaposed with the emergence of Godzilla in Tokyo. There is even one mission where you have to deal with the consequences of the accident at the nuclear power plant to Boston in 2010. The date itself gives fantastic: say, then all the houses will be video phones, and with them we carried handheld communicators with the power of modern laboratory supercomputer (don't ask why). And the person you can call even on the bus! And there will be a worldwide computer network. Imagine you play chess with, say, a Tokyo-ITE! Western fiction, which they will take? Tomorrow they will say that to the two thousand tenth year, the Union will collapse in the country, and we will have President Vladimir Vodkin... no, no, Dmitriy Medvedev!

Summary: difficult to rate the great-grandfather of the genre. SimCity was the beginning of a whole galaxy of good games with the prefix "Sim," and much of what he has brought to the gaming industry, we have long taken for granted. Graphics – ancient woman EGA, but models done carefully and for its time, more than beautiful. Sound – grandfather "PC scraper"... but in SimCity don't play for it all. Overall, the game can recommend to a gamer-the beholder, for whom the process is more important than the result. SimCity - simple and unpretentious, it does not load the player with a mass of circumstantial evidence, and perhaps this is the secret of its popularity.

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Source: Archive.org, Mobygames.com