"Whaddya mean you don't think I'm doing a good job? Taste my Godzilla-flavoured wrath!"

Have you ever walked the streets of your neighbourhood and just looked around? Looked at the poor roads that are full of potholes? Looked at the homeless, jobless individuals that walk the streets in a state of constant intoxication because the cold-hearted council won't help them? Looked at the grimy industrial areas whose vista overshadows the local park? Have you ever looked at your neighbourhood and thought to yourself: 'I could do better than this'? If the answer is yes, then the Sim City franchise is most definitely going to be your cup of tea. It won't make your neighbourhood a better place, but it will let you run rampant with a giant green Godzilla-like monster. Which is a fair trade.

The concept behind the Sim City games is fantastically simple. You are given a vast plot of land, a fairly tight budget, and free reign over a city that you yourself have designed and built. Get fed up with it and you can go on a bulldozing spree in the downtown area, or summon forth any number of satisfyingly destructive natural disasters. There is no plot. There is no end goal. There is just you, your monitor, your mouse, and your imagination. Sim City was one of the first 'God Games', and it let you do whatever you wanted with regards to your own personal community.

Well.... not exactly. The superior later additions to the series, which take advantage of the more modern technology on offer to give you more options and more freedom to put these options into place, have taken their toll on this, the daddy of the series. From the start it is important to make it clear that the original Sim City appears very limited in comparison to it's offspring. At the time of it's original release (so long ago now....) Sim City was mould breaking stuff - it really did seem impressive. But times have moved on, and gamers' expectations have increased as their sense of wonder has diminished. Still, once you get over the fact that you don't have quite as much freedom as you'd like or come to expect, you notice that you do still have quite a lot to do.

The main aspect of the game is the Create-A-City mode - and it is this that is immediately thought of when Sim City is mentioned. The first order of business is to bulldoze down any natural wildlife that may be flourishing in the peaceful green utopia that you want to turn into a sprawling concrete metropolis. With all that pesky nature business replaced with barren flat earth, you're free to begin putting your meglomaniacal construction plans into operation. The first thing you'll need to build is a power station. You can choose either coal or nuclear. People won't want to live near a coal station because of the pollution, but the nuclear reactors aren't too appealing to a post-Chernobyl society either. So you'll want to stick your giant juice-box a little way outside of your planned settlement area (though not too far - those electricity cables and pylons cost money y'know). Then you are free to build the main city. Putting up buildings is a matter of assigning a particular area over to a certain type of construction - there are three main types: industrial, commercial and residential. Once you have assigned an area, hooked it up to the power supply (either direct from the station or from a building that is already connected) and given it decent road access, the tiny, tiny digital folk that will come to inhabit your initial sleepy hamlet will start to arrive, building themselves houses, places to work, shops, and later on churches and hospitals. It's basically up to them what they build, and this is really a kind of eerie thought - you have created a community that will thrive (for a while at least) without you. In fact, the only buildings that you have direct control over are police and fire stations, and the more novelty ones - ports, airports and sports arenas, and even then it's just a waste of money building these unless the little buggers in your city ask for them.

However, creating a new London or a new Chicago costs money. Your initial budget doesn't stretch very far, and so you need to utter the dreaded 'T'-word... taxation. You can set an overall yearly tax rate, and then assign some of this to Police funds, Transportation funds and such, taking the rest to build even more extensions to your ever-expanding settlement. All well and good in theory, but as the population grows, the population grows restless, and you come under great pressure to lower the taxes, meaning you have less finance available to cater for ever more citizens. It's so true to life that it's almost like developers Maxis were trying to make a satirical point or something. Bummer. So until you really get your city going, and have a large, public-satisfying annual income, you'd better resign yourself to a tough, financially-tight time (unless you use the famous cheat for instant income, which removes all challenge from the game, but actually makes this seem like a good thing!).

It's not only the financial side of proceedings that requires much care and attention. The game automatically creates detailed graphs concerning matters such as crime rates, congestion and such, and it's up to you to make sure that these don't get out of hand. So you must duly place police stations at regular intervals (often having to sacrifice other buildings to do so...), do your best to make a viable road network (although this borders on the impossible - it seems that no matter how many roads you construct, or where you place them, rush hour traffic will still pile up, causing more complaints from your miserable, whining population - an aggravation not helped by the bizarre fact that you can only have one rail track (albeit one that can fork off wherever you choose, meaning that the train network will soon become boxed in by the ongoing expansion of your city), and try to keep everywhere looking pleasant by keeping enough park land to ensure that people don't mind the pollution so much. And still the ungrateful bastards aren't happy. They are always finding something to moan about.

Which is where the enticing 'disaster' menu comes in. From here you can choose from a varied selection of tasty trouble to serve to your population. While most are natural disasters such as hurricanes and 1666-style fires, there is the ever-popular Godzilla attack. In a totally surreal twist you can elect to silence your complaining citizens by calling forth a giant lizard to run rampage on the streets, tearing down many of the buildings that you so lovingly created. While fixing the damage afterwards is undeniably a real chore, there's something oh so satisfying about seeing all your good work torn to ruin by a huge B-Movie offcast just because you were fed up with the sight of the endless traffic jams. It adds a sense of fun to the proceedings, and reminds you that this is still a game, rather than a deadly serious simulation.

In addition to the free-spirited creation mode, Sim City contains various scenarios that see you take over an already-existing city in crisis - be it financial, in which case you must solve the various tax issues at work, be it transportation-based, in which case you must tinker with the roads and trains, or be it criminal etc. While these are diverting for a time, they cannot compete with the creation mode, as basically all they serve to do is offer you the more frustrating elements of Sim City, while handily removing all that makes the game fun. Ho-hum.

In terms of presentation, this is a game that is really starting to show its age - viewed from a top-down perspective, your city is an ugly construction made out of various shades of grey, with the occasional splash of colour thrown in, while the land still awaiting the arrival of your crack team of bulldozing professionals is a brightly-coloured combination of one tone brown land, two-tone blue water, and two-tone green foliage. Still, there's an undeniable charm to the graphics. They may be as ugly as sin now (and hardly top of the range even at the time of release), but they are still adorable in their own little way. It's hard to place exactly why it is, but there is something endearing about their retro feel.

Which is more than can be said for the sounds, which are dire. The main tune that plays throughout the game (from the title screen onwards) is one of the most sickeningly bad pieces of music in a game that I've encountered. It's repetitive, dreary and just downright pants, and what's worse is that it's one of those tunes that burrows straight into your mind that you know straight away that you hate, but just can't get out of your head. Thankfully the music can be turned off - this is a real mercy. The sound effects aren't much better - while the inclusion of voice work is initially impressive, you'll soon become frustrated to the point of tantrum as an infuriatingly cheerful voice tells you that there's heavy traffic. Since all relevant information is presented in a text box anyway, the best way to play Sim City is with your PC speakers switched off, and your favourite CD switched on.

Sim City is a bit of an oddity in today's gaming world. It's part of one of the few franchises where each sequel makes the previous entry completely obsolete - and being the first outing in the series, it really suffers. But still, despite presenting you with problems that sound too much like hard work (be honest, who is really turned on by a game involving taxes?), and offering moments of mouse-snapping frustration, it manages to be an engrossing experience. You're unlikely to even see it for sale nowadays, and I'd recommend the sequels over this any day, but for all it's flaws Sim City is still an addictive and charming experience. Outclassed in today's market, this is still a valuable piece of gaming history that has a lot to offer those who are prepared to take an interest. A bit like old people really.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/04/03, Updated 01/04/03