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Welcome to BlueNexus An eComstation Website |
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eCS
Software |
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Game Review |
SimCity
for OS/2 |
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Year:
1994 Homepage Link: N/A |
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Enter SimCity and take control. Be the undisputed ruler of a sophisticated real-time City Simulation. Become the master of existing cities such as San Francisco, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro, or create your own dream city (or nightmare slum) from the ground up. Whether you take over an existing city or build your own, you are the Mayor and City Planner with complete authority. Your city is populated by Sims - Simulated Citizens. Like their human counterparts, they build houses, condos, churches, stores and factories. And, also like humans, they complain about things like taxes, mayors, taxes, city planners, and taxes. If they get unhappy, they move out; you collect fewer taxes, the city deteriorates. The next few sections will explain the overall concept of SimCity and give information that will help you win Scenarios and design and build better cities (2) Installation: No installation to speak of. Simply unzip the file to where ever, double click on the SIMCITY.EXE file, enjoy! (3) Startup:
There are only four loaded city's and four scenarios. I looked on the Internet for more but all I found were for SimCity 2000. I did not play with the pre-made cites or scenario, I went right to the “meat” of the game and started a new one. When you start a new game you get a new window showing only two options: City Name and Game Level.
Once you make those hard choices you are dropped into the City Editor window, which is just a blank map. So lets play in the sandbox! (4) The Program: Starting up a town couldn't be simpler. Simply put up some residential zones where people live, commercial zones where they shop, and industrial zones where they can work. Tie them all together with roads and electricity. People will start moving in right away. Unfortunately, if you don't plan ahead you will quickly find yourself trying to solve a load of problems. Busy streets will have a lot of traffic causing pollution and congestion which will displease the population. When population grows, so does the crime. The need for things like stores, places of employment, and entertainment venues will also all have to be taken into account. All the while you have to balance your checkbook, as the only money you get is from taxes. You will have to spend wisely to avoid going bankrupt. If you do run out of money ,public services like police, fire brigade and road workers are the first to stop. This just leads to more problems. It all seems like hard work, but it's very fun once you start and very rewarding if you succeed.
To make things more interesting, natural disasters can happen like flooding, fires, and even the occasional monster or two. You can turn these off if you want to make life easier but, there is a special section of the game where you can play out the disaster scenarios. These include: a crime wave in Detroit, the rebuilding of Tokyo in the aftermath of a huge lizard attack ,and much more. These scenarios are quite fun but since they usually have a time limit, and the city is already build, they don't have quite the involvement as the regular game.
The Building itself is quite easy. There is limited influence on the overall things. Residential, commercial and industrial zones can be placed anywhere. You can connect them with power and roads, but you will have to wait before people will move in. At first, the zones are made up of small buildings but, when the city gets more populated the buildings change into large skyscrapers or huge factories. There are plenty of other things to build like an airport, marina, football stadium and such. You can even build small parks which will reduce pollutison (not sure about this though) and increase happiness of the people. (5) Final Thoughts: There were no major issues in the game, and it acted like an eCS program, with good behavior with other programs and no crashes. The obsession of keeping your city free from crime and information within the graphs for a game of this time is exceptional. This game could be regarded as one of the greatest ideas of all time. And in a fair review, would probably enter everyone’s top 50 for pure design alone. This game is classic. Apart from its dated ideas, I can only advice that you should download it today. This is a fabulous game and a worthy beginner to a colossal franchise. Excellent and a worthy download! (6) Updates after the review: None as of yet. |
When
SimCity for OS/2 starts up you are greeted with the SimCity screen
asking you if you want to start a new city, load city, or load
scenario.
