There Goes the Neighborhood! : SimCity Societies

I generally don't buy computer games, I get all my games for game systems like X-Box or Playstation. Nevertheless, I decided to spend some Christmas money on SimCity Societies.
Here is my experience.

Set up

First my computer gave me the message "Game will not load, you don't have sufficient memory!" I went to the computer store and purchased additional memory for both of my three year old computers (AMD processors 2 GHz, one with 256 RAM, the other with 512 RAM). Now each has 750 RAM, but neither had a compatible video card. I went to my local computer store and upgraded the video card to an NVidia 6200. Hey now at least the game will work on one machine!

The game states it requires 512 megs of RAM and an NVidia 5700 or greater or compatible video card. (1 gig of RAM if you got Gates's bloated memory hungry VISTA, I have Windows XP)

Loading

It only takes about 10 to 15 minutes for this game to load its 2 gigabytes of data onto my computer. Of course you still need the disc inserted to play. Once the game is loaded though, it only takes 5 minutes or so to load your game. This lets you go get a sandwich while it loads! Finally, the game had loaded.

Tutorial

The game guides you through a tutorial that teaches you the basics of the game. You get to design and create a city of your choosing. Maybe a romantic city, or a cyberpunk metropolis or a Tolitarian police state to make George Orwell proud. You can create a quite farm community or an enclave for artists. The tutorial shows you how to build roads, place buildings and balance your society.

In SimCity Societies, you have to balance spiritual, authoritative, artistic, prosperity, industrial and knowledge needs with buildings and decorations. Apparently some buildings and parks generate a type of mood and others use it. You have to have enough artistic mood points to build an art museum for example.

You also must balance jobs, homes and venues to keep your Sim society happy. There should be enough homes to supply workers for all the jobs, and enough venues to make the Sims happy when they aren't working. Of course the jobs have to generate enough income for you to keep building your Sim society. I made it through the tutorial.

Rules and Such

Unless you play in free play, you slowly unlock various buildings by building up a certain amount of population, wealth or points in one of the games values. Artistic points unlock things that fit into a city of artists, while prosperity points will unlock things like dream homes and skyscrapers to work in. Once things begin to get unlocked you can really give your city a "Feel" to it, and the game even helps by allowing you to sort homes, work places, venues and decorations into categories like small town, authoritative, romantic, industrial, cyberpunk, fun, or contemplative. Cyberpunk brought to mind the 2019 Los Angeles of Blade Runner, while Authoritative looks more like that imagined in 1984 or V for Vendetta. You can go the other extreme with a commune that subsides on co op farms and diary or have a wacky community that is filled with carnival rides and clown
colleges.

What Kind of Buildings do I get?

Well, it would be unfair to tell you everything, but here are a few options you have.

Houses - slums, trailer parks, condos, townhouses, tenament houses, brownstones, 3 deckers, high rise apartment buildings, state housing, mansions, haunted houses, huts, alpine villas, gingerbread homes, fairy tale castles, Tudor houses, Victorian houses and sleep tubes.

Work Places - Office Buildings, government buildings, banks, software companies, co-op farms, clown colleges, financial centers, research labs, and more.

Venues- (places for sims to have fun) Restaurants, theme parks, bars, shopping malls, concert halls and sports stadiums.

Decor - Monuments, parks, topiary bushes, hedge mazes, and more.

Gameplay

I enjoyed Marcopolis at first, I made nice condominiums and townhouses for my people, and made a happy modern looking city for them to dwell in with libraries, art museums and botanical gardens. However, much to my joy and delight, I discovered that as the city got bigger, the game would cause my computer to crash about every 15 minutes to half hour of game play. There is a reason why I like X box games and Playstation games, they are designed to actually play for hours on end in the systems for which they were made. I would just be enjoying the marvelous detail of my city, when everything would freeze, and I'd have to reboot and try again. I adjusted my memory cache, downloaded an upgrade patch from EA games (twice, the first one didn't work!). I even uninstalled and reinstalled the game which took a good twenty minutes or so. I adjusted every single setting in the game to its simplest, 600 x 800 low resolution display with no weather effects, the simplest camera angles and no night or day. With a large city, expect your computer to crash if you don't have the newest fastest gaming machine. I had met or exceeded the requirements that were listed on the box after going out and updating my computer. It is a frustrating game, but at least thanks to the autosave feature, the game play isn't lost except for your last few actions when you reboot and try to play again.

Game Play - Try Two!

This time, I was frustrated and mad, so I saved my happy Marcopolis, and set forth on a new city, Dystopia an authoritative city that cared less about its citizens happiness. I built jails, police stations, secret police stations and an imposing Ministry of Propaganda. Soon large public giant TV's were broadcasting the word of Mark and large Re-Education Halls were keeping my citizens in line. While my past city had everyone happy and peaceful and my treasury made millions, Dystopia so far has several unhappy rogue Sims causing problems and most of my Sims are merely content, not happy. I tried anyway, giving them liquor stores, pawn shops and off track betting to spend their free time, and state housing blocks and slum tenements to live in. (the citizens in Marcopolis had to make due with opera houses, sushi joints and five star restaurants while living in their mansions and towers by the ocean)

The Look and Feel of Sim City Societies

This has a normal mode where you must balance everything and two free modes unlimited simoleans and free play. It really is easy to learn the basics even if they don't make much sense to me. I understand having enough houses for all my workers but why certain gardens give my society enough artistic energy to build an art museum is beyond me. Likewise large imposing statues give rise to allow building authoritative dominant looking structures. You may mix and match these elements or go for one particular look. I've only played two cities so far (not including the tutorial) and each had an incredible look to it. My utopia had beautiful skyscrapers, affluent suburbs, shopping centers, parks, plazas and gardens galore while my Dystopian nightmare had State TV blaring propaganda. Even the music had an Orwellian overtone to it, sounding like a Russian workers march tune.

When it runs, the game LOOKS GREAT. You can zoom over your city and see it light up at night. Citizens drive and run from place to place and you can even zoom in and follow one if you choose. I wish I had a more powerful machine so I could run it on high graphics for more than 15 minutes.

Depth of Gameplay

Once you get the game to run, and figure out how to play, you will quickly discover that while Sim City Societies is beautiful eye candy, its play isn't that deep. Want a huge Opera House but don't have the artistic points to build it? Just filter to see what city ornaments give artistic points. By placing fountains and gardens everywhere there was space, I quickly had the points needed for my opera house. My treasury began to flood with money as my city got large. When I stopped playing, I had well over a million and a half simoleans in my bank account. Even my Dystopian society soon had the money to purchase huge buildings glorifying my states iron fist rule.

Summary

Yes, I will be playing Sim City Societies for a while, it is fun, and it is beautiful to look at, but bugginess and a lack of game play prevent this from really being a good game, and it is not likely to change my mind from trying to avoid computer games. As beautiful as the cities are when the game is running, I can only give this game two stars. Now, pardon me, my secret police are going to round up all the developers at the software studio and incarcerate them for some re-education.