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GAME REVIEWED: SimLife
RELEASED BY: Maxis
PRICE: £9.99
REVIEWED BY: William Stonebanks
REVIEW: -
SimLife - The Genetic Playground. This is one of the many titles in the Sim series. SimLife is on the same basis as SimCity. This time it's not a city that you have to control. It's animals and plants. you can design plants and animals at the genetic level and put them to as you design and build your own ecosystems. So basically you are putting a Rhinoceros'' head onto a tiger's body, or putting the head of a toucan with the body of a wallaby (kangaroo type) and adding the tail of a stegosaurus (dinosaur), or even a giraffe's head onto an ostrich's body (hence the cover pictures on the box). There are endless possibilities.
When I first bought SimLife, I was thrilled all the way home that it would be like SimCity but with animals. Then when I installed the game I was bitterly, yes, bitterly disappointed. there are no video sequences or voices like there are in SimCity. The animals hardly ever do anything interesting. They are just small icons that move around the screen. Occasionally, a message would pop up saying: "Species <such and such> has mutated to eating meat!" The game gradually got more boring and boring and boring, until it felt like a chore to play it.
One good thing about the game is that you can cause droughts, fires and floods that can wipe out species and test their "adaptive abilities". You can determine whether these creatures live in a paradise or a wasteland where only the strongest will survive. i.e. cockroaches. You can have the final say as to where a river flows and where it does not. The disasters menu holds hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes and even the funniest of the lot: Civilisation. not Sid Myer's classic, but you and I, my friend. these people kill and destroy the animals, wildlife and land. They build on the land and force the animals away from their natural habitat.
Another boring and useless part of the game is the plants. Unless you are a botanist and take great pleasure and pride in seeing plants spread their seeds and fly away, you will loathe this. But nevertheless, they have to be there to feed the vegetarian animals. I couldn't really get to grips with all the stuff about them.
When you take SimLife and install it, you can make one legal backup copy on a floppy disk. Hang on there fella. All the stuff on a 650MB CD can fit onto one small 3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Disk? The answer is yes. The program when installed only takes less than 3 smegs. Compared to Half-Life which takes up about 400MB, this is très très petit. (cor, he can speak French as well. Bloody Genius!)
So, what else can I say? Unless you are a fan of physics, biology and animals and plants, give this one a miss. It is bloooooody boring. And this is me speaking, the guy who worked for 5 hours to buy it. I really really regret it now.
SCORE:
55%
MINIMUM HARDWARE REQUIRED:
Here is exactly what it recommends, word for word
DOS CD ROM
Requires IBM PC or 100% Compatibles - 16MHz 386 or higher, DOS 3.3 or higher, 4MB RAM, Hard Disk, CD-ROM Drive and 100% Microsoft compatible Mouse. VGA Monitor required.
SUPPORTS: Adlib, SoundBlaster and compatibles.
LINKS: www.maxis.com