SimCity DS
June 26,2007 - SimCity first hit the console scene in the golden age of gaming--the days of Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis.  Quite simply, the game has always lived up to its title.  SimCity is a game that simulates the act of managing a city.  If you don't know how anything works, your city will fail, and you're screwed.  It's that simple.  SimCity DS is EA's way of bringing the handheld gamer a way to play the game on the go, but while it features most to all of the perks that made the series successful, it turns out that this game probably wasn't built for gaming on the go anyway.

When you first load the game, you'll immediately meet your personal adviser. This person will go over the do's and don'ts about maintaining a good city.  If there's a situation in which you actually don't like your adviser, which really doesn't matter, you can switch the adviser with someone else by taking a personal survey, and the CPU will match up your interests with an adviser that matches your tastes.  Either way, they're just big-headed sprites that really don't affect the game other than to give you some advice and provide light comic relief.

Now if you've never played a SimCity game before, there are actually 25 extremely well-detailed tutorials for you to take part in, but since they're extremely detailed it takes away from time spent actually playing the game.  Sometimes it's best to just dive into the game and learn from your mistakes, because if you bother watching all the tutorials, you'll end up wasting 2 hours of your life learning things you would learn through simple trial and error.

Obviously, the first thing to do is build your city.  You're given a very limited budget to start out, but it's always best to start with actual resource facilities.  So you'll need buildings such as waterworks, power plants, sanitation stations, and the latter in order to start out.  Eventually, you can start to build roads, neighborhoods, and even tourist attractions once your city has reached its basic needs.  You can raise your budget by simply creating chains of businesses that become successful, but they also take some time to produce and there's no guarantee that every chain will be reach such success.

Once you find your city to be slightly prosperous, that's where the fun starts.  You'll get to speed up the clock to see how your city stands and how well you've been maintaining it.  You'll also be allowed to renovate certain areas in order to generate more revenue.  There's also the case of disaster happening, such as a fire.  In the event of a fire breaking out, you can actually blow it out by blowing into the microphone--though that's probably more of a gimmick seeing as how they put a feature that's impossible in what's supposed to be a simulation game.  Then of course, there's the aliens... but let's not get into too much detail about that.

This is where most players run into DS-specific problems.  While you can still use the actual buttons on the controller to do your work, it's actually easier to use the stylus--which is supposed to be the equivalent of a mouse on the DS.  While it is easier, it's annoying because of the screen's size.  That's right, the screen's size has never been a problem before, and the second screen is supposed to help that annoyance, but this isn't the case with SimCity DS.  You still have the luxury of having a grid to pinpoint specific areas easily, but it's not exactly easy to do so when you have your stylus dragged to the corner and, for some reason, it stops plotting areas.  You can get used to it when the DS is in a stationary position, but the odds of that are slim, especially if you're out and about a lot.

The game's graphics are just a little bit better than what was on the SNES, with some minor improvements here and there along with the sprites being more active.  It's still nothing compared to playing the game on the PC with a high end graphics card though, even if odds are high that they won't even affect the graphics.  Basically, it's the resolution that brings the DS version down, but the visuals aren't bad by any means.  There is room for improvement though.  As for the sound, it's not exactly a strong point either.  You have your music when maintaining the city, and it's pleasing to the ear but not necessarily catchy.  In a nutshell, there's not much going for it, but that's not the selling point to a city simulation title.

SimCity DS does a good job at emulating the feel of the SNES and PC games, and it actually is on par with the quality of its predecessors.  The changes made are actually some of the most welcoming changes in the series.  It's just that this game really isn't meant for on-the-go gaming.  In fact, no Sim game is.  Sim games are for the couch potato-type gamers, and playing SimCity DS while on the road will lead to problems, not pleasure.

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