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SIM TOWER
Price: US$45.89
By: MAXIS
Platform: MAC
Category: [Mac GAMES-SIMULATION]
Computer Graphics Memory Disk Space
Minimum 386 25Mhz 640x480x256 4Mb RAM 5Mb
Max/Rec. 486
Additional Requirements: CD-ROM drive for CD-ROM edition, Windows 3.1
higher, Windows compatible SVGA 640x480x256
graphics driver / card.
Control: keyboard, mouse
Sound : Any sound card supported by Windows - optional
Reviewed version: v1.00. Version dated April 26, 1995.
Reviewed version on: 486DX2/50, 8mb RAM, Orchid Gamewave 32,
Windows 95 Beta 347, Panasonic CR-562 CD-ROM
Reviewer recommends: 486DX2/50, 800x600 resolution
Anyway, enough babbling, the object of Sim Tower is to build the skyscraper of your dreams, ultimately to reach one hundred floors and top it off with a cathedral amongst the clouds. To get that far you need to develop your tower from a lowly one star hovel to a dream living environment amongst the stars, five of them to be exact. Then when you have enough people in your tower and the aforementioned 100 floors, you add the cathedral and receive the ultimate accolade - the Tower rating.
Having said what I said above about ST's Oriental origins it is more of a Sim product than A-Train with the usual Maxis finance windows and tool bars. Talking of windows with a small "w" - ST runs in windows with a capital "W" and both gains and suffers because of this.
At the moment, my tower is more of a bungalow but here you can see
the lobby on the 1st floor, offices on the 2nd and fast food joints on
the 3rd.
The year is represented as follows, four quarters to the year, each with two weekdays and a weekend day to represent the quarter. Time runs at different speeds at different times of the day, slower at lunch time and rush hour and faster during the night.
So, select the lobby tool and drag it out across the window at ground level and voila, watch the framework go up and the little people plaster the walls and decorate. Next, you drop in the offices on top of the lobby one by one and then add some stairs, then watch as little people wander in and setup offices. Once they're settled in and you've put some fast food joints on top of them get the magnifying glass and click on one of the little offices. Up pops a window showing how happy they are and how many people are in there. But, most importantly, it shows how much rent they pay you and it takes but a mouse click to change it - I want money...and lots of it!
Eighteen floors and counting, floor 15 has the first sky lobby, ready for
express elevators, once I get three stars and floor 9 has hotel rooms and
at the right hand end the housekeeping unit, kill dem cockroaches.
The easiest way to make lots of money quickly, if you have some (about eighty thousand dollars or so) build a condo and wait for someone to buy it, and you get 150,000 dollars back or more if you up the price first. Once you get a "population" of 300 or more you get your second star and a bigger toolbox. The population, incidentally, varies, as it includes those who use the facilities but don't actually live in, fast food customers and suchlike. The second star brings goodies like hotel rooms, security, housekeeping and cockroaches, although they aren't on the toolbar, they just appear if your housekeepers aren't doing their job properly. The result is you need to bulldoze the room and improve your housekeeping facilities. Security is required to achieve the higher star levels, and protect against fires and look for terrorist bombs, although I have as yet not experienced either.
At three stars the toolbar explodes and things like cinemas, escalators and hotel suites arrive and much more. To get four stars you must amongst other things get the approval of a visiting VIP, but your reward is to spend one million dollars on a metro station. Five stars will let you splash out 3 million on the aforementioned cathedral once you have the required 100 floors. Then, once you have a population of 15,000 or more the Tower rating is yours.
You can build down as well as up, good candidates for underground facilities are parking spaces, recycling centres and eventually the metro station. Shops are also available later and can be placed both above and below ground, the latter position to serve those coming off the metro.
Here you can see the heart of Sim Tower (or should that be Sim Elevator ?)
the window that controls elevator shafts.
Using the magnifying glass on the elevator shafts, brings up a window to allow you to manipulate the elevators to best serve your populace. The settings apply to all the cars in a shaft, but the cars have different home floors - where they go when they are empty and no one is calling them. However, you do have the flexibility of applying different settings for different periods of the day and for weekdays and weekends. Shafts can be set to service or not service different floors and to collect people going up the shaft and then once at the top go all the way to the bottom, or vice versa. This is useful during rush hour to get all the office workers in or out. However, it is important to remember that people who live in the tower don't work there and those that do work there, don't live there. The more advanced settings are how many seconds to wait before departing a floor and how many floors closer a stationary car must be before it is called, rather than a moving car.
Running in Windows does have some advantages, nice SVGA graphics, as long
as you have a Windows driver for your video card and Maxis doesn't have to
worry about compatibility. Similarly, the game uses the Windows sound
interface to your sound card, although it has no music. The graphics are in
256 colours and are on the whole quite sharp and nicely done although they
are inherently more two-dimensional than say, Sim City 2000 or the excellent
isometric graphics in Transport Tycoon (Microprose, recommended). There
are options to turn off the animations of the people wandering your tower
and other little animations - these are very important as I come to the major
problem with Sim Tower - speed. Turning off the animations speeds things up
as should reducing the number of colours in Windows down to 256 from 65536 or
16.7 million, although this can make for some strange colour palettes on
your Windows wallpaper and so on.
The sound is quite nice with the whirr of the elevators going up and down and the sounds of people wandering around your tower and conversing in the offices, the babble in the fast food joints and the annoying ding of the elevator which I personally believe sounds just like my doorbell - waaahh. Providing it isn't turned up too loud it just adds to the atmosphere and doesn't annoy you on the whole. The sound too can be turned off and may speed up the game.
The result of this is you need to have a fair amount of patience or a very fast Pentium, but the speed problem does get less apparent once you get started and have a healthy bank balance - you don't spend quite so much time waiting for a few $$$$ to come in so you can build that staircase so you don't notice the time dragging so much. But the impact of a small amount of building is quite severe - just building a screen's width of three floors produced sufficient processing demands to slow down the passage of time very significantly.
The idea of the game is quite good, but it lacks the depth and lastability of it's older brother, Sim City 2000 - the only real control you seem to have seems to be over the elevators - perhaps Sim Elevator would have been a better name.
You may take to this game, but have a look at it before you buy if you can - and if it's on demo in a shop, compare the spec of the demo machine and yours - it makes a difference unless you have the patience of a saint.
On a final note, the CD version is identical to the floppy version, as far as I know, a complete install is 5Mb and the only extra "goodies" on the CD are demos of Simtown and Widget Workshop - but CD is nicer to install from. In any case, where I got it from at least - both CD and floppy were the same price.
Reach for the sky. Start by building a small office complex a lobby, a few offices and a cafe. Expand by adding more floors, more offices and elevators. Then diversify to hotel rooms, shops, theaters, restaurants, condos and more as you build you way to the top. Success in SIM TOWER requires design talent, management skills, business acumen and the ability to keep your customers happy. And be on the lookout for fires, insect infestations, terrorists and ...you'll find out soon enough. Sys Req: MAC-68030 or higher, Color monitor w/8bit(256
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