Its times like these that some validity is given to the fears of "casual" gaming ruining the future of gaming.

After keeping a close eye on the press, media and reviews for SimCity Creator, I decided to get my own hands on the game and some to my own, real opinion of the game. After getting my copy of the new Wii game through Gamefly, I put in about 5 to 6 good hours on the game. So what's the big deal with SimCity Creator?

I have to first say that SimCity Creator is not a bad game, considered on its own merits. Things that are supposed to work, work about as well as they're described. Buildings grow and upgrade, like the recent SimCity games. There's a respectable amount of budget manipulations, city ordinances, cars on the roads, and good old fashioned supply and demand balancing gameplay. There's subways, there's water systems, there's highways. There's even region based gameplay, where in you run a number of cities on the same map, within interactions between adjacent ones. On paper, this is a fine enough addition to the SimCity franchise.

But, in comparison to SimCity 4, a lot of the nuance and detail that could make this title stellar simply is not there.



SimCity 4 put a big emphasis on the visual and functional presentation of your city as a living world. Zooming in to street level, you can see little Sims walking around, or congregating during a lunch break. Plenty of cars zoom along the road, and get into accidents. Some little Sim mansions have little Sim pools, while another one of the same model may he rundown and have a little sim trashpile on the lawn. Billboards randomized, store fronts could be different from one building to the next. The city was alive with variables and details.

Look even closer, there were more details still. Agriculture was a real industry option. Lower, middle and upper class zones could be taxed separately. Sure, Creator has some visual representation of construction, but its completely static. Looking to SimCity 4, buildings would spend months with ever growing scaffolding and moving cranes. Even roads would generate with a little road crew filling in the world along the line you designated. If you wanted, you could follow the route of certain sims from their home out to their work place, and evaluate the commute route. Its not true exacting simulation, but there's such care taken with these design ideas, you don't care.



That care of detail just is not there in Creator. While one can commend EA for making the series a little more accessible, one has to be wary of the fact that a bunch of the "Gee, that's amazing" details were not included in this edition. Its at once a discredit to the "casual" market, and regression on the progress the series had made as a fun, "miniature trainset" experience. By foregoing the triple-A polish that would have made the game really amazing, EA gets to release a game for this mysterious market that at once is accepting of tons of micromanagement, but doesn't need all the moving parts and living detail of a "core", properly numbered SimCity game.

I'm hoping and wishing that a full blown SimCity 5 will actually happen one day, and even on Wii. I want those details. I want even more. But I also want that full package console experience. I'll take a SimCity 4 for Wii, with just sprites, if it means it can be done at a standardized framerate on solid hardware. Watering down a masterful series with a half-hearted title like SimCity Creator . . . it just makes the gaming world we live in seem just that much less substantial and artful than the work of generations passed.



Is this happening for anyone else's beloved series? Is accessibility killing the lineage of your favorite franchises?