Saving SimEarth
Written: Apr 12 '00
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Pros: Challenging, educational, and often enlightening.
Cons: Fast, difficult, and time consuming
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| thaire00's Full Review: SimEarth: The Living Planet for Windows |
I purchased this game long before it was repackaged as a "Classic", and I have to put my two cents in to keep it from being relegated to the garbage heap of software history. No one likes this game except for me apparently, but it is one of my all time favorites. Yes it is fast, and yes it is EXTREMELY difficult to play, but this is because it tries to cram the entire history of the planet into a game that can run on less than 2 megs of RAM. This is not a game as such, the manual describes it as a computer toy. You can't win, there are no points. It is a model of the Gaia hypothesis, the view that earth is a living thing-one bad adjustment can easily throw the entire simulation off.
This is the type of game which takes hours and hours to understand, and takes even more and more hours to play. The only way to create a viable ecosystem is constant monitoring and tweaking, and making lots of mistakes and accidental successes. It can be frustrating at times, but the result is an ecological education, and a sense of pride at discovering the various vagaries and details while keeping a planet in balance.
This is one of the hardest "god-games" out there-but who said that being a god was easy?
Recommended:
Yes
Version Played: Retail
Operating System: Windows
CPU: AMD K-2
CPU Speed (MHz): 201-300
RAM (MB): 64
Graphics Card Family: Other
Best Played With/Intended For: Single Player
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Epinions.com ID:
thaire00
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Member: Timothy Haire
Location: Worcester, MA
Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 0 members
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