SimCity Creator (Wii)

SimCity comes into my living room, falls apart, and makes me angry.
10/6/2008 7:32 PM | 2 Comments | Page 2 of 3

SimCity Living Room

From a design perspective, SimCity Creator does a wonderful job. This is an adoring callback to the old way of doing city-builders, translated gracefully into lean-back, couch-based gameplay. City-building games belong in the living room, and it's about time they got here.

To those of us who love city-builders, there are a few different types. Some are people-focused (Tropico), some are resource-focused (The Settlers), some are building-focused (SimCity Societies), and some are a combination of all three (most Impressions Games historical city-builders). City-building games can be as varied as shooters, role-playing games and real-time strategy games.

The focus on buildings seems to be in vogue these days. You plop down buildings directly, sculpting the city as you go. It's not unlike playing with blocks, or building something out of LEGOs. Drop in a bunch of homes, a food warehouse, a police station and a firehouse, and voilà! It's a city.

But the original city-builder, SimCity, didn't work that way. You defined zones, which you then managed with occasional buildings so that they flourished. Cities weren't built; they grew. If building-based city-builders are like playing with blocks, the original SimCity was like gardening. You laid out the garden, planted the seeds, and made sure they had a nourishing environment. You dealt with occasional cycles of withering and regrowth. What happened happened. You weren't god; you were something far more interesting: the mayor.

It's so nice to go back to this model, and it's so nicely updated for the Wii. You can either plot things precisely at meticulous right angles on the grid, or you can wave the Wii remote around, curving your roads and splattering your zones like a third-grader with a crayon. The graphics scale smoothly, and you can even get in close enough to fly a helicopter or airplane around the city (with only a tight viewing area, of course). There are plenty of goofy models for various buildings, and you can seed entirely new tilesets by dropping gigantic "Hero Buildings" into a neighborhood. The disasters are full of silly Wii-driven tricks, like slapping down a giant hand or rolling around an enormous skyscraper-crushing wrecking ball. This may be the most enthusiastic city-builder you'll ever play.

SimCity Strategery

But for all its giddy fun, there's still a deep and complex system running under the hood. That familiar RCI indicator is just the start, telling you whether you need Residential, Commercial or Industrial zones. From there, you have to deal with the top-level concerns of electricity, then plumbing, then firefighters and policemen. As a city grows, health and education are important. Pollution and traffic come into play. Your population is your bottom line, with plenty of graph and display modes to gauge how well you're doing and where your city is in trouble. It's venerable and wonderfully complex.

This is how so many of us came into city-builders, and it's still effective. Suddenly two hours are gone and you've had something to do the entire time, and there's no end in sight. This could go on forever if you're Free Playing, or at least until you meet the goal of whatever scenario you're playing. And these scenarios understand so well what makes the game interesting. The basic scenarios unlock new tilesets and more scenarios, but then there are the online contests, where you can register a high score based on various insidious challenges. These start simple enough: How big can you grow a city in 100 years? What sort of city can you make with earthquakes happening twice a year? How high can you get your health rating?