Game Reviews: Sim City (SNES)

I remember my first time witnessing the madness that is Sim City. I was spending the night at a friends house and the teenage babysitter basically ignored us as she stared at the screen and built a city. I walked up and smoothly asked a question on what I was witnessing.

Me: What’s the game?

Babysitter: What?

Me: What are you playing?

Babysitter: (with disdain of speaking to a boy 4 years younger) Sim City

Me: Cool. What are you doing?

Babysitter: Building roads.

Me: Why are you building so many roads?

Babysitter: Kid, go get a sliced of pizza and chill.

Me: Ok.

This was my whirlwind introduction to Sim City. I was like 10 years old and a high school freshman chick with a rack was building shit and making stuff happen and looking cool doing it. I would sneak downstairs and get peaks at her city throughout the night until she would pass out on the couch with a controller on her chest, and the city would continue to grow. I was amazed as this “manager of the year” and put Sim City on my Christmas wish list.

It was my first simulation game. With the help of leaving on my super nintendo all night long, I would build grand cities of infinite funds and learn the basic concept of city management (My mother many times crushed many hours of work by “accidentally” turning off the Super Nintendo, thinking it was left on inadvertently). Early on in my Sim City education, I would wake up and check on my city and find half of it burned down. Fuck. The next day, I would discover half the city without power. Fuck. 

Slowly but surely, I learned the principles of city management and eventually created masterworks. If there was such a thing as utopia, I built it when I was 10. Yes, I burned down 50 cities in the process, but it’s no matter, I became a city building boss that could impress a girl 4 years my senior. I even did the strange peculiar things like bulldozing all the roads in my city and replacing it with a rail system and ensuring everyone was in walking distance of a nice park. Because, you know, that’s what we wall want, right?

Eventually, I was ready to show off my city building skills and made plans to impress the babysitter. It took longer than I expected, but a few months later I went over to my friends house to spend the night again, but was disappointedly welcomed by his mother baking cookies.

The babysitter must have been in another castle.

I was a master builder of cities and my only reward was chocolate chip cookies.

Sim City, damn you.

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