Old Games I Still Love: SimCity 4 Deluxe

Now city builders for me I have to really be in the mood for but SimCity 4 was always a favourite after getting bitten by the SimCity bug with my first ever PC. It had a pile of games come with the mountain of useless software they always used to bundle in with store bought, prebuilt rigs. Although the only two I really remember were SimCity 2000 and Alpha Centauri and I played them pretty extensively but the PC had been bought 'for homework' this was when I was mainly a gamer on the venerable PSX (Playstation one) but anyway! What I was trying to say before I swerved down memory lane was that this wasn't my first SimCity game, just my favourite.

In SimCity 4 like most other games in the franchise you are plonked unceremoniously into an empty looking patch of verdant green countryside and tasked with turning it into a concrete urban paradise. Usually easier said than done as keeping the sims happy enough to want to move in was tricky. With SimCity 4 however you could actually develop interconnected cities via the region view which in my opinion added an extra layer of depth and consideration to the gameplay formula and could remove some of the space issues from single self contained cities. The region you see below was the default region, containing all the tutorials but there were other regions you could load up, download or even create your own if you wanted, though I think I enjoyed the default region because of variety of landscapes it offered.

The region view, the first thing most people will see!

Once you actually get into the game properly you'll find your omnipresent gaze looking down at a patch of usually green countryside. Normally you'd tend to jump right in but in my case I'd always play around with the terrain tools (which was expensive once you had actually started your city.) Depending what I wanted to do I'd either flatten it all out so I had more room or create some interesting hills and valleys if I wanted to play around with bridges, tunnels, ferries etc and just wanted it to look a bit more interesting than a big homogeneous square of concrete blocks. Throwing down a few thousand trees didn't hurt dealing with pollution either even if most of them got flattened from the initial rush of laying down roads. You could also throw in a variety of wildlife if you wanted though once the city was started I never used to see them, a shame, having your police needing to deal with bears rummaging through the bins could have been amusing.

In the beginning! (Do the tutorials!)

Once I had done with sculpting the terrain it was straight into mayor mode for me, which is the main meat of the game, though what I enjoyed most about SimCity 4 was the fact you didn't have to make a straight up city. Due in large part to the region system, you could make farming communities linked up by road and rail to a neighbouring commercial city which was then further linked to a residential one. Although the way I generally played was I'd make one fairly typical city in a central area and build it up as far as I could to give the region a decent size population and then build connecting cities for specific roles, like farming, heavy industry, commercial. I'll admit that could get a little disjointed due to loading times but it was still an interesting layer to the standard SimCity formula that added some longevity to it.

Most of the building work is done automatically by any Sims that decide they want to move to your city. You would simply set down the zones according to the three main types (residential, commercial and industrial) and selected from various densities of such. As Sims moved in they build houses, shops and factories according to all kinds of factors, like water, power and more. Their education level also played a part, highly educated sims wanted high tech jobs, whereas Sims with low education were quite happy in farms and heavily polluting factories. The only real way you could directly influence things was taxing the various levels of businesses, increasing it for things you didn't want and decreasing it for things you did. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to get the hang of it so that my Sims were living in a gleaming modern metropolis rather than a dystopian smog-choked slum.

So aside from laying down roads and designating 'zoning' areas you also had to provide various utilities and amenities for Sims. Everything from clinics and police stations to universities, parks and power stations. Keeping your Sims happy whilst trying to make enough money to keep growing was the key challenge in SimCity 4 and I'll admit I catastrophically failed many many times before I even started to see my Sims building anything close to a skyscraper. Water was always the one I had trouble with though, always struggling to get the balance of pumps and treatment plants right so that everyone had clean water without me killing the budget. Though as with most things you could make use of the region layer and dedicate one or two 'cities' to exporting water to other places, much as you could do with electricity as well as many other things.

The budget was always the trickiest thing to get a handle on initially though at various points and milestones you could get special buildings to help out in various ways. From simple things like a farmers market to special deals to help you balance the books at a downside. The most memorable of those for me is of course was the missile range, provided a fairly hefty amount of income at the cost of, well what goes up must come down so your Sims didn't often approve of being the target of a missile strike. Who knew.

That urban sprawl!

Once I did get the hang of balancing the books though it was oh so satisfying to see a sleepy little town turn into a bustling metropolis. If you focused on just building one self contained city you'd often start running into space issues especially when it came to the larger buildings like power-plants and hospitals. However, once again this was where I found the region system to give so much more freedom in how you approached city building and something I spent a good chunk of a college summer holiday making use of. I got seriously into it as well, with scrawled notes on bits of paper as I set myself the goal of entirely filling a region, figuring out the best uses and placements for everything from freight and passenger rails to the vast raised highways and airports. 

There were also more involved aspects along the way such as deploying firetrucks or police to help deal with various disasters that occasionally popped up. Also you could even drive various vehicles around your city in a little mini-game added with the Rush Hour expansion to break up the placid pace of mayoral life or even just get a little extra cash or mayor rating for the trouble. 

Traffic problems getting you down, the autosaurus will stomp them flat! (Along with everything else..)

Of course when the building was done and you grew tired or urban paradise or perhaps you just find your Sims still being obnoxiously demanding you could always do some 'creative remodelling' by unleashing various disasters. From the more typical offerings of earthquakes and tornadoes or the more unusual (and fun) ones such as unleashing a giant alien robot or deploying the autosaurus (seen above!) 

There genuinely haven't been many other city builders or economic management Sims that grabbed my attention quite so hard before or after (those are for other blog posts though.) Sometimes even these days if that city builder itch strikes SimCity 4 is usually the first stop to scratch it as I find it still one of the better ones out there and these days you could likely run it on anything slightly more advanced than a toaster so it doesn't tax even my ageing rig. 

So all in all even now when I want to satisfy that city building urge, SimCity 4 Deluxe is my go-to choice.

Old Games I Still Love: Startopia

This game for me even now still scratches that management game itch without being so completely super serious like a lot of management games tend toward being. Long ago during an extended lunch break at college I wandered into the local GAME store as I so often did seeing what new games were on the shelves, grumbling at not having enough pennies and wandering to the bargain section instead. It was at that point I stumbled across Startopia, now I love sci-fi as a setting so I picked it up and had a look at the back of the box, the idea of managing a space station was immediately appealing. The rest as they say is history, I counted up my meager pennies and picked it up the next day, even if it did massively slow down working on a college project (oops, always do your homework first kids!) 

The game got it's tentacles into me pretty fast, catchy music, colourful art style and enough buildings and research to keep me playing 'just five more minutes' until it was two in the morning. I didn't find out til a couple of years later reading an actual review in a gaming magazine that the studio responsible for it was comprised of three ex-Bullfrog developers. Though the influences from games such as Theme Park were obvious to see after finding that fact out. 

Everyone starts somewhere!

The game featured a campaign of sorts as well as a sandbox mode and multiplayer though I never really made much use of multiplayer I'm afraid to say. However, most games of Startopia start in largely the same way, you'd have some pre-packaged crates containing pre-built rooms and some basic Scuzzers (construction and maintenance robots) and a pool of energy which both acted as currency and powered your buildings. You also generally had access to all three decks of one section of the space-station, those being the sub-level where most industrial focused buildings are kept, the pleasure deck for entertainment and shops etc. The last deck was perhaps the most interesting one, the biodeck, where you could terraform and sculpt it's environment in order to grow plants for your residents and guests to relax in, or harvest them for crates of useful and valuable goods. 

From this point you generally had to build up facilities, expand into other sections and research or trade for new things to bring in more energy to build more things and so on. You also had to hire the various alien visitors who boarded the station to crew your facilities, with each species having it's own structure or job, for example the Salt Hog's worked your factories and recycler facilities. The greys would crew your medical facilities whilst the muscled red giants that are the Kasvagorian's would keep watch from your security facilities. You also had to keep them happy lest they decided you weren't a very good employer and left, though that aspect was fairly basic as if they were unhappy you simply gave them a payrise. 

The research system also I think was pretty neat at the time, whilst you could of course just buy and research so called technology crates, you could also place any item you could pick up with your teleporter equipped cursor onto the laboratory research pad and you'd usually get something new out of it. If you dropped a piece of litter onto it for example you'd unlock the litter bin. Not all research let to something new but it always at least improved something be it making those medical supplies last longer or your Scuzzer's able to run for longer before needing to head to a recharging station.

Now I mentioned earlier that it was obvious to see the influences of Bullfrog games in Startopia once I knew the dev's had come from there. The most obvious one to me at least is the occasional medical emergencies you could opt to try and deal with much in the same vain as Theme Hospital. A good way to get energy if your facilities and staff could handle it or you would be fined for each one that didn't make it or worse, you'd end up with a horde of Skrasher's ripping your station and guests apart. 

The moment you realise you need more security guards. Skrashers are nasty.

Other smaller things could be seen as influences as well from other Bullfrog games such as being able to purchase additional furniture and equipment for your various rooms to improve them (again like theme hospital.) To making sure you had enough Scuzzer droids to repair, maintain and clean your station much like Theme Park. 

There is unlike the majority of management games a combat system in place though this was likely the biggest of the games flaws. Having minimal direct control over your employee's meant combat could boil down to you hammering the attack button to stack as many of your armed personnel on the target to take it down and most of the time only a few would show up. That said it wasn't completely terrible and it could be quite fun to watch when it worked. Aside from attacking other station administrators there was also the task of dealing with spies, finding bombs from rivals to the aforementioned Skrashers that were the.. Unpleasant result of a certain infection not being treated in time not helped by the fact that every single alien petted their carrier the Memau and as your station got larger it got increasingly more difficult to keep track of everything and try to find those tiny little problems. 

Cute but surprisingly deadly. -The Memau

However even these days, if the management game itch crops up for me, Startopia is often something that will be installed for a quick play as it's easy to get into but has enough depth to keep it interesting. The music I found to be at least fairly memorable and added to the atmosphere of the game no-end.  The graphics are cartoony and colourful enough to hold up today though far from perfect and sometimes it can just feel so satisfying watching your station ticking over from on high, just a shame Mucky Foot Productions didn't get to make much of anything else. It's not my favourite management game of all time but it certainly ranks highly as an old favourite for me!

When things get going it can be quite a sight to behold.