The Collection Chamber: SIMEARTH: THE LIVING PLANET

The only way to follow an act like SimCity - 1990's runaway Number One game - is to think globally. The result is SimEarth.

Instead of a city to run, SimEarth gives you the reins to the entire planet. Evolution, continental drift, climate, atmosphere, hurricanes, nuclear fallout, acid rain, civilization, and a bunch of other disasters. All the cool stuff you need to rule the world.

Play SimEarth to the end of time. About 10 billion years or so, give or take a millenium. Getting raves everywhere, SimEarth is indeed destined to take over the world.

You get seven world scenarios plus unlimited random planets. So you'll never be strictly earthbound.

Mess with the world and it becomes an unhappy place to live. When you're smiling, though, the whole world smiles with you.

SimEarth plays all your favorite cataclysmic hits. Including volcanos, meteor strikes, earthquakes, and continental drift.

Find out what precisely makes your world tick. And what'll make it stop ticking.

Use your animal instincts and your planet will thrive, producing a rich abundance of life.

Make the wrong decision and you could wipe out life as you know it. Hey, nobody said the job was going to be easy.

~advertising blurb

In 1990, Will Wright gave us the ultimate digital toy in SimEarth: The Living Planet. You play God in one of several worlds in a given time period with the aim to keep it viable for life as long as possible.

Naturally, this is one heck of a task, and one I haven't completely got to grips with, but then even the smartest minds and keenest politicians haven't in real life either. It runs with the Gaia principle, where a planet's ecosystem is one big connected organism. Any drastic changes will throw the balance off causing mass destruction until the ravaged planet can heal again. Playing in 2019, where pollution and global warming is speeding towards the point of no return, it's quite a scary proposition.

The 2 VGA resolutions. I prefer to play using the lower resolution with more colours

than the higher resolution with less. You can see more in the latter though.

You can control natural disasters, place lifeforms and different terrain which all change the stats. These are what you have to pay attention to in order to succeed, but as far as I can tell there is no way to 'win' the game. You simply keep the planet happy until it is not. As a result, this feels like more of a sandbox than a game with a purpose. Even the selection of scenarios set on Mars, Venus or present-day Earth (ie. the 90s), there's a distinct lack of direction. That freeform style of play could be just the thing for some players, but I found it to be just the wrong side of obtuse to engage.

Being Will's second game after the original SimCity, you can't fault the guy for lack of ambition. That ambition, however, has lead to a strategy game that's very complex for first-time players. The in-built tutorial is bare-bones while the doorstop of a manual makes for the opposite of light reading, but the result of this complexity is a simulation that's often surprising and - if you stick with it - incredibly rewarding.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses DOSBox to bring the game to modern systems. Manual Included. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 28 Mb. Install Size: 34.8 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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