16bit Chronicles: Super FamiComplete #58: SimEarth (Redux)

Title: SimEarth: The Living Planet

Release Date: 12/29/91

Developer: Tomcat System

Publisher: Imagineer (JP), FCI, Inc (NA)

I have said this before with the inscrutable Populous and even the pretty groundbreaking Sim City, sim games are not my cup of tea. Probably the closest I have truly enjoyed is Sid Meier's: Civilization for the PC, but even that is half steeped in the 4X strategy genre rather than the sim genre. I think part of the problem is these games don't age well, and the user interface just doesn't translate from computer over to the consoles. Games with heavy menu systems, in general, just don't work as a console game, which is probably part of the reason games like Drakkhen or Nobunaga's Ambition haven't aged as well (though I don't think Drakkhen was ever considered good).

Background

I feel there was a fascination in the early 90's in the realm of PC and Western gaming to use the relatively new medium of video games for their creators to start "playing god." There are many games, from actually a couple different genres, that focus on the player guiding humanity, or even organic life itself through its various cycles; from single celled organisms all the way to the space age. E.V.O.: Search for Eden and Populous are all such games; this trend even continues to the more "modern" era of gaming with classics such as Black and White, Spore, or Godus (okay looking at this list of games, maybe just Peter Molyneux has a fascination with playing god). SimEarth is this type of game.

The goal of the game is to guide the planet from the Andean Age (the time where all life is undersea, taking the forms of mollusks and arthropods mainly, i.e. simple multicellular life forms) all the way up through to where they will begin to colonize the star systems around Earth. This play session plays over the course of 10 billion years. The player plays "god," as they can control everything from the lifeforms, to the climate, to the elevation of land, to creating lifeforms to populate their prototype planet. As in all good sim games, things can go easily awry, and your creation can run away from you, and I have heard this game opens up to some pretty spectacular results.

Now the original PC game was developed by the legendary Will Wright and his development company, Maxis, but the SNES console version was developed by Tomcat System. After doing a little research, they seem to be a Japanese based developer that is mainly known for porting other sims, like Sim Ant, board games like Othello, and most well-known for developing the Pokémon Stadium games for the N64 and Gamecube. They seemingly have been defunct since about 2008.

Publishing was done by Fujisenki Communicatios International (FCIfor short) for North America and Imagineer for Japan, both companies that specialized in publishing Western RPGS, such as Ultima, Drakkhen, Hydlide, and Might and Magic.

Now I do have a bit of history with this game. I visited my uncle and cousins out in California as a kid, and they lived in a double-wide in the Lake Elsinore area of Orange County (that is one of the areas that has been completely leveled due to the fires a few years back, etc). Now when I was a kid, this family had a SNES, and my cousin offered to show me his collection, the crown jewel of which was SimEarth. My uncle, especially, loved this game, and sunk hours upon hours into it (the same man who did show me the Soldier of Fortune series). As a child, I found this game inscrutable, as I couldn't figure out what to do with the games' series of menus, and figure out how they impacted the gameplay.

Gameplay

First and foremost, this is a really fun Sim game. I have always heard that it was a classic, as during my research most of the reviews I have read confirm this. I was skeptical, as these games still don't age well, but I tried to go into this with an open mind. As an adult, the UI is very intuitive and much better laid out that its contemporaries such as Populous and even Sim City. They are still a bit clunky, and it can be frustrating that at times it seems like no buttons on the controller lead to any sort of action, but this is definitely a game based on patience. It is akin to having a terrarium or aquarium; you are literally waiting to see how your changes will affect the lifeforms on your little digital planet over a long period of time. Now this will not be every player's cup of tea, and it almost wasn't mine. The beginning of the game is a little slow to get going as you are waiting for more lifeforms to become available on land, and are trying to balance out the perfect atmosphere, temperature, climate, etc. for your little burgeoning lifeforms.

Now I am a teacher by profession, and upon revisiting this game for the blog I found the perfect way to play this game. Not to date this blog, but I am currently reentering the school year, and we are going to be completely virtual due to the pandemic. Right now, we are in training for this virtual learning. I had this game running on my tv in between trainings. During my five to ten minute down times, I would enter my commands to change my "terrarium" and then have it "percolate" in the background while I conducted my training. During the next break, I would revisit and see what happened during my absence. Finally, I see the value of sims: they are a game for background or absent minded mechanical focus.

In one of the more interesting gameplay mechanics, you aren't trying to just evolve human life (that is an option), but you can evolve most any type of life into the eventual space age. You can create a civilization of lobsters, reptiles, or even machines if you so chose. My first game was insect people for the win.

There is a ton of replayability to this game, as there are challenge modes, the most well-known of which is Daisy World. Daisy World is where the land is covered by a swarm of daisies. This doesn't sound like a problem, initially, but the daisies will have a large effect on the atmosphere, the temperature, and will compete for resources. They will even evolve, eventually, into man-eating plant like people if you let them, so you need to be much more focused in your strategy, and much more cognizant of the games various systems if you want your world to survive.

In true Sim fashion, these games can be the most fun when everything goes wrong. Similar to the Sea Men episode of South Park, your little civilization is more often a danger to the planet rather than the planet being a danger to it. They can cause pollution, global warming, or lay waste to each other in warfare. It causes the player to always be on their toes, and it was never dull to see what mischief my little people got up to next. Playing god was never easy.

The game is certainly educational, and educational in a way that could actually be beneficial to students. As a history teacher, I actually focus on Pre-history and the formation of the Earth/theories of life as my first unit of study for my students, and a great deal of this game covers a lot of what we actually cover in my class. The game is based off the popular Gaia theory, which is the idea that it is the interactions of the various biomes and lifeforms in those biomes which create a sustainable environment for all life to exist. In other words, if any sort of interference affects even just one part of a biome, the effect is felt throughout the whole. Often solutions in this game can take a more abstract route. For example, in Daisy World, I couldn't get my lifeforms to have a foothold on land due to the competitiveness of the Daisies. I tried lowering elevation, causing natural disasters to clear some land, adding different insects or animals to try to feed on the plants, and not much worked. Eventually, I played with the climate, which allowed me to freeze out some of the plants and gain an area where my lifeforms could thrive. It was the most intuitive, but also the most indirect way to achieve the results that I wanted.

There are very few low points in this game. I guess if you aren't the most patient or enjoy a bit of action in your game, then you may want to skip this one. The beginning of the game, especiallly, is really slow. You have to manage your energy (god energy I guess), and it can be a grind to wait for it to recharge or for you to have as much control over the systems of the game that you would like.