Imagine the humorous situations involved in going to the cinema to see the film Sin City, but instead of expecting an overrated faux noir adaptation of an overrated faux noir comic you expected to see a film about a mayor floating high above a city placing buildings down. Of course this would never happen because very few people would confuse the letter N with M. Even if this did somehow happen they would have presumably seen the posters which at no point featured the phrase “Reticulating Splines.” In reality it wouldn’t be that funny anyway because the cinema is very expensive these days and they would inevitably come away disappointed. There are two morals to the story 1. Don’t laugh at other people’s misfortune 2. If you are going to make a Sim city film then you probably don’t need to worry about making the M very big on the poster. There is also a sub-moral which is don’t start reviews of Sim City with paragraphs about the perceived importance of the visibility of the letter M on a film poster.
After all this comes my hilarious jape “I bought Sim City for the SNES and it was nothing like the film.” The best thing about this jape is that the game Sim City precedes the film Sin City by about ten years. The other best thing about this jape is that I didn’t buy Sim City at all, Uncle Pete bought it because it was six pounds unboxed in cash converters. (In the days before cash converters became a frightening shop of stolen goods sealed into glass cabinets.)
The premise behind Sim City is that you are the mayor of a city which you must run to the bets of your abilities. This premise is a lie however because when you start off there is no city, just a blank expanse of randomly generated land. This means that not only is the mayor unelected (after all there was no there to elect him) but also that the mayor has unwarranted powers in terms of choosing where to place buildings, roads and power lines. At the same time your ability to actually rule your citizens is surprisingly limited to control over tax rates and a couple of money making options such as legalised gambling and parking fines. In reality this kind of power would never be concentrated into the hands of one man, the people from British Gas decide where the power plant will go, Arriva choose where to operate their rail franchise and Barrett Wallace homes choose the best place to plonk down houses. The Mayors duties really boil down to wearing a fancy chain and legalising prostitution. Happily Sim City threw reality out of the window (presumably after the failure of the Japanese only ‘Fancy no golden chain boy: Whore Liker Buraden’) so we are given all the powers of a high ranking soviet town planner without the terrible memories of your time in the red army. Your dictatorial powers even go so far as to be able to choose the name of the town. Of course naming it after your self (i.e Unclepetesville) is the obvious way to go, why not try typing in some rude words? Fun for all the family!
So once you get your blank expanse of land you need to start building and this generally always goes the same way. You build a power plant, stick down a selection of commercial, industrial and residential zones and then connect them up with roads and power. Once the little squares on your map have started to grow into houses, shops and factories you place down a fire station and a police station. After this you have generally run out of money and you just sit and watch as your city grows and you fail to make enough money in taxes to do anything else. See the problem with Sim City is that it is much like playing with Lego at first the possibilities seem endless and you get a bizarre sense of satisfaction from slotting everything neatly together, however you inevitably run out of resources so you have to start using odd shaped blocks that make it look a bit rubbish and then you run out of the right colours so your spaceman base is half black and then has loads of red blocks at one end and a green roof. In the end you smash the Lego in a rage and curse your primary care giver for not providing a more adequate selection of blocks. The same goes for Sim City as you will inevitably get bored of building your metropolis and start unleashing the disasters which range from flooding to a giant Bowser attack. There is very little you can do about these disasters apart from watch them undo all your hard work and ineffectually place little flags which are meant to divert the emergency services into the required area. The fire brigade very rarely manage to put out a fire once it starts spreading so what chance have the local constabulary got against a giant bipedal turtle?
The game does try to exert some sort of calming influence in the form of Mr Wright the mayoral adviser. Mr Wright will helpfully inform you what to do when things go wrong, for example if there aren’t enough roads he will tell you to build more roads or if Bowser attacks he will hide under a desk. What he fails to mention that you have since spent the money necessary to make these changes and that there are armed peasant militia amassing outside of the mayoral mansion. Actually things never get that bad in Sim City, upset citizens generally just move away or leave messages on the bottom of your screen saying “Brownouts! Build another power plant.” Despite this your feelings towards Mr Wright will remain the desire to pick him up and rattle him. If he knows so much why doesn’t he just be the mayor? The answer of course is that if you finish the game it is revealed that Mr Wright never actually existed.
Taken for your consideration, Mr Mayor a man with dreams of building a city that overwhelmed him. A man unwittingly getting on a train marked anywhere and getting off at a station best known as….the twilight zone.
It is for these reasons that I must give Sim City a solid Sim Ant out of Sim Tunes.
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