SimCity Creator (Wii)

SimCity comes into my living room, falls apart, and makes me angry.
10/6/2008 7:32 PM | 2 Comments | Page 1 of 3

I'm angry. I'm angry because I really like SimCity Creator. If I didn't like it so much, I wouldn't be angry. If it didn't work well on the Nintendo Wii, or if it was just a sloppy money-grab console port, or if the old-school SimCity gameplay didn't hold up very well, I'd be all, like, "Yeah, whatever." I'd shrug and Fry it and move on. But none of those is the case. Instead, this is a potentially great game -- let me say that again: great game -- and one of the best things to happen to city-builders in a long time. So, yes, I'm angry.

I can haz condo?

I've been playing one of the medium-difficulty scenarios. It's a small map, with almost no free space, covered by a mishmash of mismatched neighborhoods. The goal is basically to double the population within the time limit. Naturally, this requires a lot of urban renewal. So I've razed buildings and rezoned large swathes of land to attract and house more people. Since I'm a longtime SimCity fan, I know to use dense zones to pack in more people and jobs. So far, so good. This is great. This is SimCity. And I'm doing it from the comfort of my living room!

But for some reason, many of my dense residential neighborhoods won't make the transition from manors, which house very few people, to condos and apartment buildings, which really pack them in. Although I've devoted a lot of real estate to residences, I can't meet the scenario goals without figuring out how to get those condos and apartment buildings to pop in. There is no mention of how this works in the manual, in the tutorials, in the tooltips, or in the info displays for individual buildings. I am left with no information when it comes to actually playing this game as it's supposed to be played.

And that's just for starters. Here are some other things SimCity Creator can't be bothered to tell players: What is the standard ratio of different zone types? How do taxes affect this? How do the police kiosks work? What good are water towers? What on earth do all those important-looking gift buildings do? How do you set up railways, subways and highways, which also look pretty important? How do deals with neighboring cities work, because I sure could use the money? What's the point of some of these ordinances, especially the little cutesy ones that don't have any helpful information once I've drilled down into the text? What's the point of leveling up advisors, and why should I be paying them money when they seem so useless? How do I unlock flight missions, which I have to do to finish this scenario? And that's just off the top of my head.

As a longtime fan of city-builders in general and SimCity in particular, I can work out some of this stuff. But what about all the people with Wiis who could have been won over by this winsome update? Do developer Hudson Soft and publisher Electronic Arts really intend nothing else than to lead newbies through a perfunctory 15-mission tutorial that only details the most basic of the basics? What's going to happen when these new SimCity fans get to the medium-level scenarios, or grow their Free Play cities to a certain size, or decide to try one of the really cool online challenges, or just want to know how a certain feature works? This is a deep strategy game. Its developer and publisher should damn well treat it like a deep strategy game.