Talking about “Sim” games has brought up a lot of old memories 🙂

@mairhart reminded me about “SimTower” — I still remember the cover that a British gaming mag ran for it, but I don’t remember the name of the magazine 😛 It was a rather interesting entrant in the “Sim” series and got you to do a lot of the city management stuff on a more smaller (but not quite microscopic vs. Macroscopic) level.

Then there was “SimAnt” which I think was all about managing an ant colony? I know I played it but I remember very little about it now …

“SimLife” was what I was really excited about back then because I thought I could create new electronic life, run my own planet, etc. But in reality, if I remember now (30 years later) it was rather boring 😛

But there’s also all the “Civilization” spin-offs. I knew I was forgetting something, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember “Alpha Centauri” till I looked it up 🙂 I still don’t remember much.

And speaking of forgotten games, apparently there was also “Sid Meier's Starships” — despite being one of the newest in the series, I remember nothing about this either. I don’t know if I knew of it and forgot or if I’d just lost all interest in “Civ” games by then and simply didn’t care. But I think I’ll try to find a copy and play it just to see how it goes …

#Gaming #Civ #Sim #Reminiscences

@broximar Back then, I think I would have played anything since there wasn’t much to do beyond read 😛 I knew this guy who had a huge collection of games and he would grudgingly give you a copy of a game if you gave him something new.

Given that there was no Interenet (and BBSes were not quite heard of in Sri Lanka at that time), this “sneakernet” was the only way to get games back then where I was. And everybody wanted the popular stuff like “DigDug” or “Need For Speed” — not “Sim” games 😀 But yeah, “SimLife” was disappointing after all the stuff I’d conjured up in my head based on the description …

@mairhart

@f @broximar I remember briefly playing an Earth sim with a Gaia character, but SimLife and SimEarth look much more complicated. Either I played something else, or gave up right away. The online screenshots of both games look impossibly boring, at a time when I was having fun with the 2-D sidescrolling version of Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein.

I also remember spending many hours dialing into CompuServe and AOL, which began to drastically cut into my game time by 1993.

@mairhart My guess would be that was “SimEarth” 🙂 Now that you remind me, I kind of vaguely recall Gaia and looking it up on Wikipedia seems to (somewhat) confirm this in that the game was based on James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis …

I think I played most of these on an early laptop with 5MB of RAM and a black-and-white screen. So I have no colourful images in my head, but I do recall my absolute disappointment with “SimLife” because I had expected something magical … but I was young back then 😛

@broximar

@f @mairhart SimTower had a direct sequel called Yoot's Tower

There are also a few modern clones. I like Project Highrise even though it skips the elevator management from SimTower