#4: Sim City

Nintendo?

My sheet listing all the SNES games listed Sim City as being a Nintendo first party game. This seemed off to me, since I'd swear it was made by Maxis. I decided to do some investigating and it turns out Nintendo actually coded this game with their own programming team with permission from Maxis. There were tons of interesting tidbits on the Wikipedia page. In particular, Will Wright apparently had a level editor for a war game that he really enjoyed playing. So he kept developing the level editor and turned it into Sim City. And then had a hard time selling the idea to companies because there's no actual game there. You're just building a city. It turns out people enjoy just building things and Sim City became quite the hit.

Who needs more than 8 characters?

As far as the SNES version goes, I remember it being pretty fun as a kid. Of course, since then I've played many newer versions with tons of features added in that just weren't around in this version. In particular I kept trying to click on buildings to see how many people were living there, and the exact land value, and maybe a randomly generated name for the building. No dice.  

.4479% annual interest rate? Sign me up!

I played around a little bit, built a bank, and was given an offer I simply couldn't refuse. I spent all that new money and went back for more. It turns out in this version of the game you can only get a new loan after the old one has been fully paid off. So I was stuck with no money and a partially completed vision of a city. In particular I'd just hit brown-outs because I built too much stuff and not enough power plants. I found myself in a familiar situation in a game like this... The game is really fun when you're building new stuff. It's pretty fun while watching your new stuff bloom. It's terribly tedious when you're broke and can't build any new stuff. I remembered an infinite money code exists in the game but decided there was a better end to my playthrough...

Why must I be a safehaven for plumbers?

Bowser just missed my house!

And that was that. Bowser didn't blow up the stupid bank but did visit my precious casino.

The SNES version of Sim City actually innovated the 'reward' buildings for doing different things. Run out of money, get given a bank. Get enough people, get given a mayor's house. Build enough police stations, get a police headquarters. Is this the genesis of achievements? Do we have Nintendo of all people to thank?

This game was awesome for the time. It was a port of an existing game but had some Nintendo flair thrown in and an innovation or two. The genre continued to evolve and I'd rather play one of the later games but for the time this game was fantastic. Playing it again really made me want to play another Sim game. Apparently a new version is coming out in the next year so maybe I'll hold off for that?

Rating: A