Friday, October 22, 2021

SNES Game Review: Sim City

 Sim City is a Super Nintendo game that came out in 1991 (or 1992 if you were in Europe) that kind of makes it as it sounds, about a city, simulation and building.  That may sound boring to some but it did do well with the public overall.  What do I think of this game? How did it fare overall? All that and more below.

Positives:

1. Music: If you wanted a simulation city building game, the music itself is very calming and very chill, making it a chill atmosphere and a chill game overall which is really nice.


2. A good simulation: Overall, all the things you want to use in a city simulation/building is there.  Buildings, resources like fire/police departments, taxes, residential areas, and for a larger city things like airports and stadiums are also incorporated.  It is a good thing to have the basics and know-how to manage it.

3. Appropriate city structure: I think the way Sim City went about with city building was in-depth and good.  The tax system, anything happening with it (IE: disasters, regular maintenance, etc) and building power, transit roads and railroads are all important city functions so that is all incorporated here.  Running ports as well if you are in a coastline or lakeside town/city.  So therefore it is major for them to have. This game does that and does it well I think.

4. Extras: I love that you are given a Mario Statue at a certain point, that Bowser can rampage the city and you can just destroy the city after all the work of building it.  It's a game that doesn't need to end if you don't want and I like that.

5. Scenarios: This is a cool one.  You can go in with different scenarios of the past and try to work on the city and bringing them back up (I believe one notable one was in 1906 and building back a city.) And for a city building game, cool scenario factors like this are a good add on.

Negatives:

1. Limitation: Due to what the game is about, there isn't much besides that with exploration of what to do with the city building.  Yes you can acquire as much needs as possible to do well with the city building but there just is limitations to what you can do to make this more fun (IE: See Roller coaster Tycoon and the vast amount you can do there compared to this.) 

2. Not a great representation of city building: Yeah this widespread massive city only seems to happy in coastal areas or if you live in Texas these days in the USA.  It is probably more suited as a European game to city build in different locales but overall, it's not very accurate that anyplace just builds to 500k citizens in a matter of years.  

Overall Rating/Rank

With the positives and Negatives, I would rate Sim City a 8 out of 10. It's negatives are just a result of the game they were going for, but I think the city building/progression is the major one downside.  I do think they provide an accurate representation of the city layout/structure with tax code, referencing to services and more over the course of time. In terms of an overall rank, I'd have to still give this a top 50 rank because the game was so note-worthy for so long.  I'd say among SNES games, I'd rank it 47th.

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