SimCity Enhanced
Eternal cuddly game #9
Type of game
A collection of sprites, each one cuter than the last. Except for the ones that are missing—F***ING S***.
Release date on our machines
1993—the month it was released exists somewhere, buried under tons of concrete.
Développeur
Maxis Software Inc., a legend among legends in the management game genre. Acquired by EA, a legend among legends in… uh, no, nothing.
Publisher
Interplay Productions, Inc., which had all but disappeared during the 2000s, was revived in the early 2020s thanks to a series of small miracles.
SimCity Enhanced: Not available in any commercial zone, real or virtual. Electronic Arts didn't even bother to do it justice. Just like the very first one. What a bunch of run-down shacks!!
I didn't know it at the time, but when our first “modern” computer arrived at my mom's house in 1995, that game was already quite a seasoned veteran. I also didn’t know that it replicated the gameplay of the first SimCity down to the last detail, since I already thought I was playing the very first version of the very first game in this legendary series. That is, until I discovered the real, true first installment even later at a friend’s house named Jeffrey Laboratoire. I didn’t dare tell him, but I thought his version looked really ugly compared to mine. Because mine—released on CD-ROM instead of floppy disk—got an insane graphical overhaul, a revamped interface, and cutscenes galore to spice up our gaming sessions a bit! And even though it was two years behind the times, I thought it was absolutely incredible! It easily rivaled the standards of 1995—Worms, for example, to name the one with the worst graphics of them all. Another thing my stepdad had bought for himself, and that I got to call my own. It really left a mark on me, that bastard! The game, not my stepdad. Well, him too, but if I start talking about him here instead of SimCity, things are going to get awkward fast. Anyway, setting aside Colonization—which I had the privilege of admiring from afar at my cousin Walter Valise’s house—this was my very first management game all to myself.
A remake ? Really ?
With plenty of free time to explore every nook and cranny. Not surprisingly, the whole thing completely washed my brain away with torrents of water. Wastewater from the most polluted sewers in the most run-down cities that I was building as best I could with my clumsy little fingers. Water that leaves permanent stains—the kind of stain you never want to get rid of.
Of all bricks
So, yes. Let’s talk about SimCity. Here we have the original city-builder concept. The ancestor of us all—at least if you consider yourself a huge shopping mall or a heavily trafficked highway. I’m sure there are people like that out there. Watching our city grow, seeing little houses pop up, merge into apartment complexes, then into forty-story skyscrapers, scattered industrial zones turn into huge, smoking refineries, and tiny shops become massive offices filled with shady traders. I just absolutely loved it. Honestly, that alone would’ve been enough for me as a kid. No need for police stations to fight crime, fire stations to put out burning buildings, or roads crisscrossing everywhere! All that just drained my money and kept me from growing my city as fast as I wanted to. Well, by turning off the option to have fires, I just built a single fire station for my huge city, and at least I had peace of mind on that specific point.
Yeah, you really have to place one, because otherwise the firefighters will constantly yell at you through voice messages or cutscenes—even if the fire doesn’t actually exist in their own reality. These cutscenes live up to their name, since they literally cut us off mid-action, popping up whenever they feel like it, filling the entire screen just to make us look even more ridiculous. Besides, I’d cancel all the disasters. I hated that stuff! What kind of masochist would want to inflict that much suffering on themselves? Pampering your city as if your life depended on it, only to watch it get destroyed by a tornado or a fake Godzilla? NEVER! Nah, just build, build, build—and nothing else. And placing parks—except for one of the sprites that appeared randomly among the four or five available. Because as stupid as it sounds, that specific image caused crime to rise, while the others didn’t. So I’d destroy it and recreate it right away.
Go figure—maybe the developers slipped in a little joke, like, “Come on, that park’s going to be full of perverts and drug dealers; no one’s going to notice, lol.” I really wonder how I figured that out, since I hardly ever looked at the graphs that let you analyze the city’s health—other than when I was interrupted every two minutes by cutscenes of angry city employees. Too long a sentence? Yeah, whatever. I guess I was still checking the crime rate from time to time. Traffic, pollution, housing prices… etc. I couldn’t care less about any of that. I just read the annual financial report, which doesn’t leave much room to maneuver: manage taxes, allocate the budget to the police, fire department, and transportation, and that’s it. So of course I devoted myself to building houses, shops, and factories!
After a while, I found myself in a real bind, because I was making like seventy or eighty dollars a year, with all the expenses I had. And with a salary like that, you can’t build almost anything, since a single basic zone costs a hundred. So what do you do when notifications pop up saying citizens are demanding a three-thousand-buck stadium, that you need to build a new power plant to prevent blackouts, or even worse, when the business sector asks you to develop an airport? Come on, that’s ten thousand bucks down the drain! What’s the strategy here, huh? Especially since you can’t resell anything. Even tearing stuff down in your city with a bulldozer costs money! It makes perfect sense, really, but it’s incredibly frustrating. You can always cut back a little on funding for the police or public transportation, but to let crime rise and watch the roads fall apart bit by bit? No thanks!
And now these little videos are popping up more and more often, explaining just how highly the wronged folks in the story think of us. At least we can turn them off, unlike the sound notifications. But skipping the cutscenes means missing out on some truly wonderful moments of video game weirdness. Honestly, they sometimes had a really creepy vibe, sometimes pretty scary, or, on the contrary, just way too funny. When a guy, dying in a cloud of radioactive smoke, insults you because you didn’t do your job right, it really gets to you. Especially when you’re ten years old. The police chief threatening to tase us if we don’t give him subsidies, the fire captain yelling at us as he emerges from a burning building, a body in his arms… how can I explain it? Let’s just say that Alien or Halloween didn’t terrify me as much as that did. But when you “spy” on the residents—which plays a random video from among a dozen or so featuring wildly exaggerated scenes of everyday life—it’s a lot of fun.
Back then, you could write that on the game box and sell it as revolutionary content. Seriously. In any case, when it comes to the over-the-top acting, I wonder if it doesn’t go even further than Command & Conquer. The latter definitely drew its inspiration from this. An effect that’s probably amplified even more by the French dubbing, I imagine. Even today, there are a few lines that pop into my head on their own from time to time. “Fuzilla is coming, FUZILLA IS COMING!” every time I see Godzilla somewhere. “‘Don’t try to build roads on areas that are already built up. IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY!’” Too bad the later SimCity games didn’t keep that feature. By the way, have I already told you that I loved building in this game? Yeah, okay, but why? Because the graphics fascinated me on a level that’s almost unmatched today. Only Heroes III offers pixel art that’s even more magical—that’s how impressive it was. I loved them all, those images of shacks (even the poor people’s ones, I promise).
When I played SimCity and then went out onto the street, I inevitably ended up comparing the buildings I saw to the ones in the game. And nothing kept me entertained on my walks more than that. On the other hand, I hated it even more when certain residential areas would turn into hospitals or churches. Like, you’d see cute little houses clustering together into a charming red-brick apartment building, which keeps getting bigger and bigger, and BAM! It turns into a totally gross church—because, let’s face it, those sprites were hideous. Seriously, why did they code it like that? Just add those buildings to the list of available structures, instead of destroying my homes! Because honestly, you get through all the content pretty quickly—it wouldn’t have hurt. A stadium, a port, an airport, and two types of power plants. I know it’s only 1993, but still! The Super NES version is the same age, and it offers more choices—that’s kind of lame, isn’t it? Oh yeah, I forgot the police station and the fire station.
But with those things, the fewer I put on the map, the better off I was. The only thing that made me laugh in the first few days was the police station, with a huge yellow “PD” on its roof. Roflmao, you know. Police Department—it took me like six years to realize we weren’t just being insulted by a bunch of homophobic cops (PD in french is an insulting synonym for gay). That left the option of building railroads instead of roads. There was even a way to trick the game: don’t build any roads at all, just tracks, thereby avoiding pollution and traffic jams while still meeting transportation needs. Personally, I never managed to build any functional rail lines. No matter how many trains I filled the map with, the transportation official would always tell me, “The rail network is inadequate!” Dude, just let me fit three or four houses on the map, please. There are other games for locomotive junkies like you.
Sometime in 2021, a new wave of nostalgia for SimCity Enhanced hit me right in the face. I bought it again—or rather, found it for free on Abandonware, if I recall correctly; EA really should’ve gotten its stuff together. I reinstalled it right away, just to admire those cute sprites all over again. I chuckled with delight as I listened to the super-simple (but oh-so-charming) sounds that accompany road construction or the setting up of industrial zones. I happily dove back into this game—one I could play with my eyes closed—rediscovering the atmosphere that had made such an impression on me when I was ten. And I got frustrated all over again when hospitals and churches ruined my pretty residential neighborhoods. But still just as captivated by that timeless pixel art, I decided to make my own little list, ranking the different buildings by density and property value. Because the black-and-white screenshots in the manual are, um… just too ugly.
I already knew you could never build the second type of industrial zone, which only appeared in pre-designed scenarios. No problem—all I had to do was start one up to take the screenshots I needed. However, as time went on, I realized I was still missing the same commercial zones. I couldn’t find them in any of the images available online. Same thing in the gameplay videos. Damn it all to hell, that frustrated me so much! I tried to find a way to extract images from the game’s data files, but I didn’t succeed. I ended up posting on Reddit, hoping that someone else had already gone through this unbearable ordeal and found a solution. The result? Zero comments, just a single tiny upvote two months later. OK! My obsession makes no sense—fine! I’m giving up. It’s really hard, but I’m giving up.
SilenceCity
So yeah, uh. Hmm. A word about the song? Song in the singular, right? Because aside from the fifteen-second intro, there’s nothing worth listening to. It’s a shame, especially when you consider what we got later on. SimCity 3000, for example, had some absolutely insane tracks! Back in 1993, we still thought we could get into a game without listening to anything. Well, to be honest, I was still having a blast, obviously. It’s kind of funny, because there is indeed a certain Brian Luzietti credited for this intro (a guy from Interplay, apparently, who also worked on Fallout, M.A.X., and tons of sports games—really, tons and tons). But another guy is listed as the composer for the other tracks. Tracks that don’t exist, that is. A mystery. It doesn’t obsess me as much as the ghost shopping districts, but it still bugs me. Maybe the jingles you hear during the cutscenes? I don’t remember—I was too scared by what I was seeing to pay attention to anything else.
SimObsolescence
When I played it again in 2021, once I got past the sheer joy of seeing those little houses and shops come back to life, I still quickly found SimCity to be incredibly boring. No water or waste management, no interactions with other cities beyond the map’s boundaries—a map that, incidentally, consists only of flat land and water. And virtually no tools for managing our finances…
Maybe I should’ve tried to pull off a disaster or two, just to see what it’s like at least once in my life. So, is this game totally overrated, or what? Nah, nah—it was seriously awesome back in ’93, ’94, ’95. Once we got past the start of the 21st century, uh… it feels a little stale, but no more so than Warcraft II, Doom II, or Magic Carpet, right? Anyway, I’ll fire it up again one of these days to get another dose of nostalgia, and try to end a fiscal year making more than $150. Thanks, SimCity Enhanced. Thanks for making me dream so much with just three pixels of a convenience store parking lot or an apartment building lobby. I’m a little scared to hang out in parks because of you, but that doesn’t take away from the hours of obsessive fascination you gave me.
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