Classic Review: Sim Tower

With the upcoming release of the highly anticipated SimCity 3000, the third in the infamous series of city-building simulations by Maxis, I started to break out my old copies of other classic Maxis simulators. Probably my favorite, rivaling even the original SimCity (which was my first computer game), is SimTower.

SimTower is a great game, one of those "permanent hard-drive games," a fairly small, 6-megabyte diversion which can be started, played for a few minutes, saved and exited when you want a quick break from work.

As for gameplay, think of SimTower as SimCity zoomed into one building. You're the manager, developer, designer, and overall God of a block in a SimCity, and you start out with some cash which you use to start your tower. You choose to where place elevators, stairs, as well as where to put the game's major pieces: Commercial zones (stores, restaurants, coffee houses, etc), Offices, and Apartments. When your tower gets larger (you start out with a 1-star tower, and as you grow, so does your star-rating), you can add more features, such as hotels (including single rooms, double rooms, and suites), movie theaters, ballrooms, and much, much more.

SimTower, while at first glance may look simple (indeed, the game tries to simplify things by representing your tower as a flat, 2D building - no depth, only height), in actuality it is a very, very complicated game, and building a tower that doesn't suffer from major problems (such as parking, recycling, roaches in your hotel rooms, bomb threats, or simply long waits for elevators) is quite hard indeed. Probably the most annoying "rule" in the game is that elevators can only go up for 15 floors. To get to floors above 15, sims (people that inhabit your SimTower) must take an express elevator to the 15th floor, then take a regular elevator). Complicating that is that elevator shafts can't be situated right next to each other, leading to big problems when your tower gets up to the 40- or 50-floor range.

Elevator management is a big part of the game. Since weekdays go by as you play (along with weekends), you'll see people enter and leave your building. If you don't have enough elevators, you'll start to see them line up at your elevators. Unhappy sims don't like to stay in your building for very long. Therefore, controlling how elevators work (especially during rush hour) is very important. You may want to make sims take the stairs by disallowing the elevator to stop at certain levels.

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