I played SimCity Creator on the Nintendo DS – 16 years later
Could I achieve enlightenment after all that time?
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There’s something in my childhood I’ve always felt went unresolved.
The days of the Nintendo DS reigned supreme – Nintendogs was 1poppin’, the LEGO version of everything existed, and Mario came to the small screen. Sure, we had a Playstation, but nothing compared to the impact a tiny box and stylus could have during a 14-hour car ride.
My favorite games to play were in the Sims franchise. I loved MySims, comparable to Animal Crossing nowadays, but I was absolutely obsessed with SimCity Creator 2008.
The problem? I never made it past the dawn of civilization.
I looked for cheap fixes to fill the hole in the years that followed. Cities: Skyline was too complicated for what I craved. Minecraft didn’t have the same overlord capabilities. Sims is fun, but it’s not the same as achieving enlightenment.
I’ve thought about that game ever since, missing the pixel-by-pixel building placements and my dwindling hunting patches. Why had my society never evolved? I racked my brain, but I couldn’t come up with a reason. I couldn’t quite shake my failure to survive natural disasters and provide for my people past the B.Cs.
So, when my brother revealed that he had found his old Nintendo DS and all our old games, I was ecstatic. Running my fingers through LEGO Indiana Jones and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, happy memories flooded in. The one thing I really wanted, though, was to see my Sims again.
I would have a second chance to play God, and this time, I would do it right.
Getting the game to work was rough. It wasn’t showing up when we plugged the card in and several restarts did nothing. My brother was determined to make it happen, though. Just when I had lost hope, we tried a final restart and a different SD card, and the blocky blue landing page I had dreamt about for years appeared.
It turns out what I did wrong was not wait for my population to grow to 5,000. Impatience had been the downfall of my civilization.
I was enthralled when I jumped into a new base game, determined to advance to the next time period in one play. That was a bit unrealistic. I picked it up about once a month over three months, doting on my displeased cavepeople. The wait became agony as my people slowly chipped away at the trees. I longed for taxes, schools, and hospitals.
Finally, my Tower of Babel was built! At last! The medieval era was upon me. I gained access to education and public safety, though I turned down donating to the monasteries. I cleaned up the town ruins when unhappy taxpayers rioted. I built a castle with $20,000 and mistakenly funded an army for $7000 in the hopes of ushering in peace, which didn’t come.
I continued to rake in the cash and grow my population. I built parks and carved rivers. My people complained a little less as I spawned buildings for them to populate and farms for them to tend to. My symbol of the European Renaissance came in the form of the Notre Dame. After all that time, I had done it. I had completed another era.
The happiness of the city was finally in my hands.
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