The Closeout Warrior

The games in the SimCity series have steadily gotten more and more complicated. I understand it’s because the superfans of the series really like micromanaging every aspect of their little simulated people’s lives. So you keep getting more and more things that you can do, which means that you have more and more things to think about as you’re mayoring in your city. First you have to create appropriate zones, then you have to give them power, then they want water, then they want roads, then they want highways, then they want a place to stash their trash, and etc., etc., etc. Your Sims are very needy.

And you, as mayor have to do absolutely everything by yourself, while listening to your advisors, of course. Or you could do what I did and completely ignore them, build the city however you want, and then watch as nobody moves in, you run out of money and the game ends.

But assuming you do manage to make a city that people want to live in you have gobs of information at your fingertips, hidden away in all kinds of menus. You can see where the traffic’s congested the most, you can see who does and doesn’t have water service, or how your rating as mayor is, or where the crime is, or where sphere of influence is for the various schools in your city, or lots more stuff.

The game is really just more of a refinement of SimCity 3000, which was a refinement of SimCity 2000, which was a refinement of the original game. And each time they make a new iteration of the game, they pile on more stuff to do and to manage, which is fine for the really hardcore city manager types, but kind of overwhelming for a neophyte. Heck, it was a lot for me to handle, and I’m an old hand at Simming around.

However, there were two things in particular that I did think were kind of neat about this game. First was that if you had a copy of The Sims on your computer, you could have one of your Sims from that game move into your city and tell you what he or she thinks of it. Then you kind follow what they do throughout the days and such. Kind of an interesting crossover.

The other thing, though, is the inclusion of Rush Hour. Rush Hour is essentially an expansion to the base SimCity 4 game that allows you as mayor to drive around your city to do silly little missions. The missions are pretty lame, and the vehicles are pretty well uncontrollable, but it kind of gives you some insight into how brilliantly or, in my case, how poorly the roads in your fair city are laid out.

There was just so much to do in this game that after about a dozen or so hours into it, tweaking the settings for the trash, the water, the police, the education system, zoning for more properties, poring over traffic density maps, stomping out fires, and so on, I just kind of got a case of ‘minutiae overload’ and I put the game up on the shelf in indefinite hiatus.

The original Yeti Sports game was pretty dumb, but I guess some people liked it for some reason. Maybe it was because of the insipidly simple gameplay, because there wasn’t a whole lot of skill involved. But it was received well enough that it got some sequels, which added some wrinkles to the yeti-penguin relationship.

One of these is Seal Bounce, a little time-waster that has you, as the yeti, tossing penguins upward in a neverending vertical chasm. Along the walls are seals that will give a little boost if the penguin hits them, you have five chances to make the penguins go as high as you can, and your score is totaled at the end.

Since your yeti is on a moving ice-platform thing floating on water, your angle shifts constantly, couple that with the way he winds up to hurl the birds and you have a recipe for not being able to consistently do anything the same way two times in a row, so it pretty much boils down to luck, and playing a game like this long enough to get five lucky penguin tosses in a row didn’t really seem like a good use of my time.

The Helicopter Game is one of those silly little Flash games that makes the rounds every so often. This one’s really, really simple, though. You have a helicopter inexorably flying to the right through a cave of sorts. The cave is filled with obstacles, and you have to try to avoid hitting them. The only control you have is to make the heli go up (gravity makes it go down). As you go along you get points, and the goal is to get a high score. See? Simple!

The further you get in the cave, the more it constricts and the faster it throws obstacles at you. You only get one shot to make it, hit anything and it’s game over.

I played this game for roughly twenty minutes and then haven’t really thought about it again until today. So if you have twenty minutes that you don’t need anymore, you could do worse than playing this game.

You could do better, too.

I liked other games in the Quake series, even though I wasn’t very good at them. So when I found a game in the series that I hadn’t really heard all that much about on clearance at my local department store I snapped it up.

Turns out, though, that this game is a little different than the other games that I’d played. This one is a team-based shooting game. Basically, you take one of the sides from the games, the humans or the Stroggs, and compete in various maps to complete a series of objectives.

I played this game for a couple of hours, but I just don’t get in to this kind of game for three reasons: my aim’s not that good, I don’t want to play an objective-based game with people I don’t know and, I find that completing objectives makes my FPS overly complicated.

I guess I should pay more attention to the games I buy, even if they are cheaper than $10. But I’m a sucker for good graphics, and occasionally compelling box art. And it’s good to play games that I don’t like once in a while, partially to reinforce that I still don’t like them, but also to possibly play something good that I’d have otherwise passed up.

Pearls Before Swine is a silly little Flash game that made the rounds a few years ago, but has kind of disappeared.

It’s really simple, it’s based on the game Nim. The gist of the game is this: you have three rows of pearls. You and the computer player take turns taking as many as you’d like from any one row, and the one who takes the last one loses.

It’s that simple… and it’s that hard. Unless you have a firm grasp of the rules of Nim, you’re going to lose at this game a lot. And then you have to put up with the actually kind of annoying laughter from your opponent. But if you win… oh man. I won’t spoil it for you.

You can try your hand at it here. But I wouldn’t budget more than about 10 minutes for it.