Wednesday, August 27, 2008

SimCity Societies: completed!

I bought SimCity Societies a few months ago when T-Mobile was selling it cheaply; since then it's been an occasional game here and there when I've been unexpectedly held up by trains or planes. I've been playing through the scenarios, in which you're tasked with increasing or decreasing pollution, unemployment, housing, freedom, and so on.

The first few scenarios were easy; the last one not so. Building upon (ho ho) everything up to that point, the last scenario was to build a city back from poverty to excellence. I had to increase the population, reduce homelessness (to less than 10%), and increase employment (to greater than 90%). Of course, as the population increased, what with my city being a wonderful place to be, then the latter two suffered. After a year, I'd well exceeded my population target, but that just meant it was increasingly difficult to find space to house everyone, and I was having to demolish things like shops and cinemas to make way for more workplaces. Getting rid of entertainment venues, however, meant that the population was fast getting miserable - which then meant they weren't motivated to work anyway.

Finally, in month 19, I built loads of high-rise buildings and got housing up to 95%; I then built around ten fireworks factories all over the city in empty spaces and employment just snuck up to 90% - just enough to complete the scenario, and the game.

Luckily, there's a free play mode, so it's still possible to use this as my mobile game of choice. It's a very cut-down version of SimCity, indeed - but it's an excellent game to have on a mobile.

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