SimCity Creator (Wii)
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!
alt="Palace"/>What does this building do? Your guess is as good as mine.
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.
alt="Crystal"/>This may be the most enthusiastic city builder you'll ever play.
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.
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.
alt="Robot"/>Goofy disasters abound, but this guy has nothing on the llama stampede.
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 voil?! It's a city.
alt="Cityscape"/>Mmm, curvy! SimCity isn't just right angles any more.
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.
alt="Community"/>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?
But as you're playing these scenarios and challenges, as you're enjoying the game as it was meant to be enjoyed -- as a complex system in which you cultivate some sort of order out of chaos and entropy -- you'll quickly hit that brick wall of bad documentation. You want to build a city with a high health rating? Have fun trying to figure it out, because the game isn't going to help you, just like it didn't help me when I was trying to get apartment buildings and condos into my residential neighborhoods.
I know it's so '90s to complain about bad documentation. But this is something from before the '90s, an in-depth system that requires understanding to manipulate. Part of what makes this game work so well is that it's a throwback to an earlier time, and represents a whole different model of gameplay. I guess anyone can jump in and have fun for an hour or two, and maybe that's all SimCity Creator is good for. Maybe there's simply no audience for deep city-builder gaming on the Wii, and all the depth here is a mistake -- a byproduct of the original design, dangling from the edges like an unsightly artifact they didn't bother to trim. Maybe I'm just not playing right when I try to explore that depth in the scenarios and the online challenges. Maybe this is just a toy for kids and casual players -- in which case, they can have it. I'm going to go play something on the PC, where the developers take me seriously.
This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
