Playing A Game SimTower PC

I've still barely scratched the surface of the new Tomb Raider; I installed my copy of Heart of the Swarm yesterday; my Club Nintendo post-play surveys for New Super Mario Bros. 2 and Paper Mario: Sticker Star expire in two days; not to mention the rest of my ridiculous backlog (why did I buy so many games in December!?). So of course, instead of playing any of those, I've been playing a 20 year-old elevator simulation game.

The recent brouhaha over SimCity 5 - which, is hilarious, by the way - reminded me of the joys of property construction, and specifically of childhood hours wasted in front of SimTower. If you're not in the know, SimTower is in many ways a vertical iteration of the classic SimCity formula: your job is to build a tower that's attractive to little sim-people, be it with offices, condos, hotel rooms, fast food joints, swanky restaurants, movie theaters, et al. Unlike a traditional SimCity (and oddly like the new one), you don't necessarily have to provide for all the needs of any individual sim-person; it's totally fine, and expected, for sims to e.g. live elsewhere and only come to your tower for work, or live in your tower and then go work somewhere else. But unlike SimCity 5, you don't have to give a flying fuck about that "somewhere else." You just have to sustain your internal economy and try to push up your population to gain ratings: 2 stars, then 3, then 4, and 5, and ultimately a "TOWER" rating for being the most awesome tower ever.

It's a shame that the game's remakes and sequels haven't really modernized the game much - though to be fair, I know little of the Japan-only The Tower DS released in 2008 - because the freedom and simplicity of SimTower makes it very accessible, and consistently engaging for the duration of your tower. But there are aspects of the game that have been left in the 20th century, like the inability to batch-process property modifications (you'll instead have to inspect every single property one by one), certain properties which mystifyingly can't be demolished (so make sure you place them correctly the first time), hard limits on the numbers of certain properties (and elevators, which is crippling to large towers), and vague in-game indicators of why a property has a bad evaluation (e.g. "Conditions are terrible" without any elaboration as to why).

Nevertheless, 20 years later, SimTower is a fun and charmingly-polished diversion. It's aged surprisingly well, aside from the technical puzzle of running it in the first place. (It's possible to get going in a copy of Windows 3.1 running in DOSBox, but ultimately the best solution I found was in Wine on Linux, in Windows 3.1 version-mode and with virtual desktop emulation.)

Better than: SimCity SNES
Not as good as: I dunno, a better city simulator, I guess?
There are some fan-made attempts to remake this: but they're either abandoned, still in slow development, or just not very good.

Progress: 5-Star Rating

Rating: Good