The first accurate sports simulation was Atari Football (1977), a two-player game which popularized the trackball as a controller. Sports simulation games are an old and established genre, with roots in the golden age of arcade gaming. Will Wright’s most recent effort, the ambitious Spore (2008), is at least partially a simulation game as well. Addictive, fascinating, and offering an endless amount of variety, The Sims, together with its many expansion packs and sequels, has become the best-selling computer game franchise of all time. Players control what type of house their Sims live in, whom they marry, what their jobs are, and all other aspects of their lives. All of these, however, and even SimCity itself, were eventually eclipsed by The Sims (2000), which simulates the lives of human beings. A number of other, similar games were also released by Maxis. SimTower (1994) let players design their own skyscraper. SimAnt (1991) depicted the life cycle of an ant colony. SimEarth (1990) gave the player control over a young planet with the goal of guiding it to maturity. In addition to spawning its own subgenre, SimCity became the first of many “Sim” games created by Maxis, which for a time in the 1990s was practically synonymous with the simulation game. CitiesXL (2009) by Monte Cristo, on the other hand, more closely adheres to SimCity’s contemporary format. PopTop’s Tropico (2001) and its two sequels feature a Caribbean “banana republic” setting. Some, such as Caesar (1992) and Pharaoh (1999) by Impressions, feature historical settings others, such as Outpost (1994) by Sierra are based on science fiction. Various other city-building games have followed on SimCity’s success. Four sequels of increasing complexity have followed over the years, the most recent being SimCity: Societies (2007), but the standard-bearer being the earlier SimCity 4 (2003). SimCity sought to recreate the challenges of urban planning, with factors such as power, zoning, transportation, taxation, crime, and natural disasters. This preference for creation and planning over destruction is emblematic of the entire simulation genre. Its creator, Will Wright, first hit upon the idea for a city simulator when he realized that he preferred the map-building feature of Raid on Bungling Bay more than playing the game itself. Perhaps the crown jewel of simulation games, at least in terms of influence and popularity, is Maxis’s SimCity (1989). The subject matter of simulation games varies greatly from game to game, but all simulations share a desire to accurately reproduce a complex activity or system in a virtual environment.īecause there are so many different subgenres of simulation games, it is best to look at the histories of each in turn. This can mean anything from operating a vehicle, to organizing a business or sports franchise, to running the lives of a virtual family. A simulation game is a video game which seeks to recreate some aspect or aspects of the real world.
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