Paperjam

SimCity for the iPhone: first impressions

Games // Steve // 17th December 2008

I lost many hours to the Amstrad CPC version of SimCity as a kid. Now that I don't have so much time to waste, what a brilliant idea to buy it all over again, for six quid off the Apps Store? Probably not.

By all accounts it's pretty much a version of SimCity 3000. Here's quite alluring office-y type woman from the tutorial. Oooh, she looks kind-of pissed off at me. Mmmm. Give me a slap, go on.

Slightly crappy typography but we'll let that slide for now - and not that I'm in a position to criticise.

During the tutorial dragging over the map is a bit of a, um, drag - your finger seems to get in the way. The secret seems to be to zoom in a bit more by pinching or double tapping. Here's me trying to shut up my demanding Sims by shoving in a bit of precious road - the circled arrows are the buttons you drag out.

Zoom right in and you get some detail, although it gets pixellated at the extremes. There's smoke stacks, traffic, mysteriously disappearing trains, and this Flea Market in the Commercial Zone.

As usual, Shitsville quickly started to fall apart when I took my usual hippy approach of building a public transport system alongside the road infrastructure. Briefcase wielding chappy looks unimpressed with my rail system. He goes on to say "personally I'd go with roads". Dammit, I'm trying to build the ideal town here.

SimCity ran impeccably, if a bit slowly on my 1st gen iPod Touch, which is reportedly the bottom of the bunch when it comes to performance. Other users have reported crashing on iPhones. The recommendation is generally to reboot your device before crying your shiny little eyes out in forums and blog comments. Zooming is a bit laggy, the pinch method is a bit slow compared to the double tap.

But it's great, if, you know, a bit pointless. There's already been a bit of whinging about the price being too high at £5.99, but how does it compare to the average DS game?

Also there's a whole load more; schools, water pipes, recycling, lots of advisors, taxes, ever increasingly ornate parks - all with the feeling that whatever you do, it's going to shit either way. It feels deeper than yer average quick and dirty iTouch game and it's worth it.