SimEarth

~ SIMEARTH ~

Hudson Soft / Maxis / TTI

Super CD-ROM

1993

This horrible snoozer has never appealed to me at all. Reading the hefty manual is like studying for a geology test, times I'm glad are behind me. And this isn't really a game that you can learn on the fly, as options are aplenty, and it plays out excruciatingly slowly. The theme doesn't appeal to me much anyway, so I see little reason to force myself to endure the experience. Bringing disaster to my planet in the form of a good meteor shower is the most "fun" I've had with it. I take comfort in the fact that it cost just two dollars shipped, though the poor sap who sold it to me paid more than that just to mail it and included the original $60 Toys "R" Us receipt as if to lay a guilt trip on me. It didn't work!

I sat through the whole introduction, with this whiny globular guy going on about how unhappy he is and how the planet can't possibly flourish while he's unhappy.

After that fantastic opening, I started playing. And, well, this seems like a no-win situation for me at this point. The "game" has too many options and moves too slowly for me to bother learning it on the fly, and whenever I try to read through the manual, I end up dozing off.

Maybe someday I'll find the patience necessary to get into it. All I know for sure is that I wasn't happy while I was playing it, and my planet couldn't possibly flourish while I was unhappy.

So I bombed the planet with meteors and then turned the game off.

Nice plague sound, though!