SimCity Cartridge
How does a city work? Why does building a Police Station not reduce crime some times? Will you get elected as Mayor of your own town next year? Find out in this addicting game as you build for hours.
First Impressions
The push of a power switch and the sweet sweet sound of 16-bit music fills the air. As the music plays, I am starting to get excited about what is about to come… Wait What?! The intro theme is only 8 measures long? Eight measures of 3/4? I know music takes up a bunch of space, but these eight measures were one of the most annoying loops I have ever heard! Smashing the start button to save my ears, the journey was about to begin.
“Oh, this is interesting… there is a ‘practice’ mode? That’s not normal is it?” I remember thinking to myself, but damn am I happy it was a thing! Before I knew it a city of population 10,000 was constructed. Looking down at my watch, wow! that took 4 hours… and I am only playing “practice”.
“I Guess it’s time to jump into a real game!” I exclaimed as I navigated back to the main menu to start a new city. With 999 maps and 10 seconds of load time after selecting a number, I became impatient and chose map 002. With a better understanding of what I needed to do, I selected “hard” and started building like never before.
When Things Got Hard
Everything was going swimmingly, with a population of ~100,000 and then it happened… One of my nuclear power plants had a meltdown. Just like that, almost a quarter of my city was destroyed and it looks like there is no way to remove the nuclear waste. Time to reload.
Airplane crash, tornado, flood, fire, disaster after disaster. Right when I thought everything was going fine something would happen and my population would go down, the crime rate would go up, and my approval rating as Mayor was dropping. It turns out planning and running a city was not so easy after all, but I would not give up. The game started taunting me: “No, you can’t make it to population 200,000… 300,000… 400,000”. And I was every bit determined to get there. With game speed on high and the game running in the other room, I would pop back in to check and see if there was enough money to build another neighborhood or if a disaster had crippled my flourishing city and caused me to load from my last save.
SimCity PCB
Final Thoughts
Overall, this game always had me trying new things and caused me to problem solve more than most games I have played in a long time. I am very happy with the replay value and the technical challenges this game provides. I have a feeling this game will be one of those games I keep coming back to time and time again.