Sim City (Infogrames, 1990)
I saved up and bought Sim City after reading Matt Bielby's brilliantly hilarious review of it in Your Sinclair (August 1990). He absolutely loved it!....
"It really is the bee's knees, and will appeal to just about anybody - even my dad thought it was 'Quite good, I suppose' and that's saying something!"
As the Mayor, you must decide on a name
for your brand new urban (mis)adventure ("Spectropolis"? "Kempstown"?),
select the difficulty level (easy!), and away you go!
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| "8bit-town"? |
Then, it's a matter of putting in the necessary infrastructure - power stations, power lines, roads, etc. - and zoning land for residential, commercial, or industrial purposes.
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| A nice short commute to work from "R" to "I" |
There's lots to take care of - you'll be very busy managing the city's ever-dwindling budget, providing the necessary services (police, fire department), and balancing the number and type of zones and making the city desirable enough that people will want to live and work there! Also, there are all sorts of terrible disasters that can arise (earthquakes, air crash, tornado, or nuclear meltdown!) - or that you can inflict yourself onto your city's poor, unsuspecting residents. It's frenetic and it's a LOT of fun!
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| Where does the money go?!! |
In summary, this is an excellent game! The programming team at Probe Software did a brilliant job converting it to the humble Speccy. It's a lot of fun playing Mayor - managing the city, keeping it solvent, expanding the zones and growing the metropolis, reacting to disasters and satisfying the miserable residents. I played this around the same time on the IBM PC - of course it had more colour and a Godzilla-type creature as an additional disaster (!), but it was essentially the same game as the Spectrum version. It holds up well even today.
In my opinion, Sim City is a Spectrum classic and a must-play.
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