Reviews

The game which started a whole era of god games, and one which, while probably better on other platforms, still isn't bad on the Speccy. Very little is lost in the conversion from the "big boys", and it's still wonderful to see your city grow from a little village of just a few blocks into a sprawling metropolis.

This game taught me an important lesson about politics: keep taxes low all year, then jump them to 20% in late December. Once you've collected, drop them to 1% again. Repeat. Sheeplike humanity will love you, your coffers will swell, and your cities will span the entire landmass.

Actually this game is full of useful life lessons: the need to plan ahead for big projects; the importance of keeping people happy in order to get the best out of them; and that you needn't bother with a fire department if you've turned Fires off.

Once the big money is rolling in, you can amuse yourself by creating elaborate suburbs that, when viewed from a high elevation, appear as rude messages and personal slurs.

The graphics suit the Speccy perfectly, the only noticeable thing missing from this conversion is the "Godzilla" disaster. Sim City is a thing of beauty.

This is mostly a game that I enjoyed playing on the Atari ST but the Spectrum version holds up quite nicely given the limitations of the machine.

The game is almost exactly the same, just missing a scenario, although the graphics and user interface rather suffer in comparison with the 16-bit versions too.

A remarkable achievement from a technical perspective and a great game to play from the days when "Sim" games were a bit more than just glorified interior decorating.

I still remember getting a magazine (possibly CRASH!) with an advert for this and thinking they'd made a horrible mistake. Sim City? On the Speccy? Really? But.... Nahh.... isn't that THAT 16-bit game? The posterboy of the 16-bits? The "nyah nyah we've got Populous and SimCity and you've got a duff conversion of Golden Axe and your mother hates you"?

Even more remarkably, when I got my hands on the game (mail order, fancy double case, still somewhat in disbelief it was on the Spectrum...the SPECTRUM!), it was immediately clear that Probe had done a blinder with the port. All the features from the 16-bit machines were present and correct, except the graphically intensive Godzilla disaster. The aim, as if you didn't know, is to develop a booming metropolis starting with a handful of houses. You can zone out areas for business, homes and shops, build all the roads and powerlines, build police stations and hospitals. It's the sort of affair you can lose DAYS to, never mind hours.

And lose days I did. It was one of the few games I would save dutifully to Microdrive of all things (and that went predictably horribly wrong, of course) because I was loath to give up even a second of playing time with poppycock loading. It hooked me horribly, and no incarnation of Simcity since has had quite the same effect. Perhaps it was just because it was hugely original at the time, but Simcity really felt at home on the Spectrum for me. All I see with my Amiga version is chunky resolution, grating sound, that hideous default palette brown and green colours everywhere... it's aged, and badly. Weirdly, the Speccy version hasn't aged a day. Perhaps the very lack of glitz and the workmanlike sprites serves to keep the gameplay undiluted - I'm not sure - but there's infinitely more charm there. And what's more charming than a computer doing something that it wasn't intended to do and really shouldn't be able to? Marvellous.

Fitting Sim City into just 48K of memory must surely go down as one of mankind's greatest achievements and makes the construction of the pyramids seem like child's play in comparison.
Technical wizardry aside, Sim City is a great city building sim and unlike it's successors is actually fun to play that doesn't get too bogged down in boring details. I have little doubt that If Boris Johnson had played this growing up than London would be a much nicer city than it is today.