Reviewed: April 21, 2006
Reviewed by: Jason Porter
Developer
Vivarium
Released: March 15, 2006
Genre: Simulation
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone
7
7
5
8
7.0
Supported Features:
Yutaka "Yoot" Saito, a Japanese game designer considered by many to be a bit on the eccentric side, designed the original SimTower years ago, as a PC game published in America through Maxis (the company responsible for Sim- just about everything). Jason Porter, an American game reviewer considered by many to be a huge nerd, played the original SimTower years ago as a budding gamer. Imagine his surprise when he popped The Tower SP into his GBA and saw the same game again, after all these years!
In truth, although The Tower SP is extremely similar to the old SimTower, there have been a few changes made, and I was eager to get down to the meat and potatoes of this little sim and poke around. I have come to the conclusion that the new is a fine and fairly slick port of the old. It is still as good a game as it ever was. But does it really belong on the GBA? And does it still have a place in today's gaming world, more than a decade after it was first published?
For those of you who did not grow up with such wonderful - wonderful! - edutainment software as SimTower, SimAnt and, um, SimLife, The Tower SP is about managing a baby skyscraper and guiding it to massive, city-block-wide glory. A simulation, there is no way to exactly 'win' or 'finish' with a game, although there is a pinnacle to be achieved. In SimTower, this pinnacle was represented by a star rating based on population. As each star ranking was attained, additional structures and services (such as movie theaters and parking garages) became available to build. The Tower SP is largely identical in its implementation.
The biggest question for me, having played the original on an old Mac back around 1995, was "how the heck are they going to manage the controls?" Thankfully, there actually weren't as many things to control as I had initially confabulated. The Tower SP is a far cry from trying to port Civilization 2 to a handheld. Overall, its interface is clean, intuitive and effective.
At the beginning, players are offered a lengthy and somewhat boring tutorial from a cartoon character, Mr. Yamanouchi, who plays your tycoon boss and mentor. The tutorial is quite thorough though, and easy to understand. It seems like it would be a big help for first time players. My main concern being figuring out which buttons did what, I got a bit impatient with it, but I did learn what I wanted to know.
The Tower SP's controls are, astonishingly enough, broken down basically to three buttons. Liberal use of menus help accomplish this. The game's toolbox of unit types and tower diagnostics is accessed through the right shoulder button. Things like selection and placement are handled by the A button, while the B button pauses things and allows you to take a closer look at each tenant's details to find out what's up with them. I really appreciate how smooth the game interface is, and how easy it was for me to find what I needed to find in just a few seconds' time.
The A button, when held, also serves as a fast-forward button. This is nice, but it brings me to my main concern with The Tower SP: most of the mid game is just waiting and watching. Every night, security patrols your tower (one of several extras taken from SimTower's sequel, Yoot Tower) and the inflow/outflow of cash from rent fees and maintenance costs is processed.
Every morning, the budding skyscraper fills up with little people intent on doing whatever it is they do all day. In between, there might be some toilet scrubbing to do, or you might be able to pitch the wares of one of your tower's restaurants to potential customers in order to increase its sales, both of which are accomplished by mashing the A button frantically for a few seconds over the appropriate unit. Other than that, there's not a lot to do except watch the tower grow.
The main fun comes from picking new units and placing them effectively (Offices near restrooms, security every 4 floors, and so on), but for an old hand like me there is no challenge to making a tower grow respectably large. It gets hectic near the limit of tower size (45 stories with a population of 2,000, incidentally - a smaller amount than the original), but I found that I had little motivation to drain my GBA's batteries down to get to that point.
With such a slick interface, though, tower building can still be quite fun - for a while. Bear in mind that The Tower SP is a sim game, with no real end and only a limited number of building blocks with which to construct your tower, and you should have no trouble enjoying it. Overall it is more interactive than SimTower was, which is good... but a lot of that interactivity is just mashing the A button, which is too bad.
The Tower SP's graphics are surprisingly clear for such a small screen, and manage to have almost as much detail as the old version I played as a kid. That doesn't sound too impressive in and of itself, but it's important to bear in mind that, unlike DOOM or an old Zelda game, The Tower's screen is completely cluttered with miniscule people and little tiny storefronts and fax machines. The fact that it's easy to tell everything apart, even on a relatively dark original GBA screen, is a testament to the skill with which the game's graphics have been ported to the system. In addition, clever use of transparency effects makes navigating the various layers of management a breeze.
In the end, though, the fact remains that The Tower SP's graphics basically amount to half-centimeter tall stick figures and lots of static images. Compared to many of the games available for the GBA, that isn't exactly impressive. Clear or not, the game's graphics remain basically the same as those of its grandfather from 12 years ago.
The sound effects are fun, especially for me, since they are almost entirely the exact same ones from the original SimTower. The fact that I can immediately recognize this, after probably 10 years since I last played that game, is a testament to their quality. On the other hand, it also speaks volumes about how relatively few there are to begin with.
There's hardly any music, but what minimal music there is, is lacking and forgettable. Overall, The Tower SP's sound package is flat average. But then again, sound isn't the reason you'll want to play The Tower SP to begin with, it being a sim game and all.
There's actually nearly limitless replay value to The Tower SP - if you don't mind doing almost exactly the same thing over and over again. The game is no Tetris - certain buildings must be placed near certain others, limiting your options for a successful tower quite a bit. And the presence of a fast forward button doesn't hide the fact that a lot of this game is just waiting and watching. But for those who like the inflow/outflow of financial management games, The Tower should prove enjoyable for quite a long time. I know it has been a trip for me to take it for a spin again after so long, whatever its shortcomings.
Sometimes it's hard to review a game that explicitly does not set out to break any new ground. As reviewers, we generally expect to be writing about what a game does differently than its competitors, and whether or not that works for it. The Tower SP is just such a game, however. Comfortable in its tried-and-true play style, it changes little from its predecessors. Basically, it is a way to breathe new life into an old (though still popular) franchise, and a way for addicts of the originals to take their drug of choice with them on the road.
So, bearing in mind that this game sets out to fill a niche, rather than explore new territory, I have to say that it does a fine job. The interface is sleek, the graphics are clear and the thrill of building a skyscraper from the ground up can still be had. It might be hard for The Tower SP to find a new audience, being as it is an unusually slow-paced game in the twitch-reflex world of handheld titles, but I wish it the best of luck nonetheless. It isn't for everyone, and it's not the next big thing, but overall it's a solid offering from a venerable and respected series.
