SimCity

A staple for anyones SNES collection, Sim City might not be the most exhilarating or action packed game ever, but it is still a fun time waster of a god sim. My best friend growing up had a hand-me-down Super Nintendo from his older brother and I remember fondly the long lazy afternoons after school or on the weekends of managing our respective cities and see them absolutely gutted by waves of crime, urban flight, brown outs, lack of tax payer funds leading to crumbling urban decay, and the occasional natural disaster. Looking back its an exercise in futility on the harder levels but it still surprises me how addictive and charming it is. Just wish the loading screens for the maps didnt take an eternity, something I wish the Wii digital port rectified.

I love the idea of SimCity a lot, and it was truly a revolution in its own way as a non-purpose sandbox game, but this first game is juuuust sooooo limited compared to what the descendants would bring. I know I'm supposed to judge based on its era, but the very limited set of building options(just a couple of power plants, police departments, and three kinds of basic buildings), it is incredibly easy to figure out how the mechanics work, and you just work towards city optimisation. It seems that figuring out the mechanics behind SimCity takes all the magic away, but what little magic there is in searching the unknown in the end just amounts to very little, because the playset is so small..

The scenarios make it worthwhile, but the chaotic displacement of the roads and railways immediately make your eyes roll, much moreso when people are complaining about traffic when there are more pressing issues(such as Godzilla attacking the city for one). It's moments like these that you're awfully tempted to use the tax exploit, and that suddenly defeats the purpose of the scenarios too.

It's cool that various ports later had terrain editors and switchable graphic styles, though.