Chris writes: Last week, friend and Telegraph games writer Tom Hoggins attended a Bloggers’ Day for WiiWii.tv at EA’s Redwood Shores studio in San Francisco. While there he got hands-on time with a few games from EA’s Sims label, and he’ll be posting his impressions over the next few days. Today’s game is SimCity Creator.

Last Friday, we visited EA’s Redwood Shores campus to check out its upcoming Sims label releases on their annual ‘Bloggers’ Day’. Stumbling jet-lagged and bleary-eyed through the front door of the gaming behemoth’s offices, any malaise of the gathered bloggers was washed away by the sight of a gigantic screen showing off Crysis Warhead. Game pods and huge posters lined the walls, while we were doused in blue spotlights from the giant rig that loomed above us: “a leftover from E3” says our guide. And that was just reception; further exploration of the 23-acre campus gives a glimpse of a company that makes more money than God - and loves it. A giant fully-equipped gym here, an NBA-sized basketball court there. American glitz and excess resides in every corner- this is a company at the top of the biggest entertainment sector in the world and it’s not afraid to show it.
 
And we’re all here to find out how they do it. EA are showing off their their latest MySims titles for Wii and DS: MySims Kingdom, SimAnimals and SimCity Creator. Each will sell a bazillion copies, of that there’s little doubt. Every title is pitched perfectly to capture the maximum amount of audience. What’s surprising, perhaps, is just how good they all looked.

 

 

First up was SimCity Creator Wii. Despite a name which may give the impression of a title that’s all about making your own buildings, Creator is classic SimCity. Demonstrated by the softly-spoken Japanese director, Mitch Ueno, Creator is controlled with just the Wiimote. Brilliantly, roads can be ‘painted’ on with the pointer rather than painstakingly placed like building blocks. Ueno starts off his city in ‘free mode’ by drawing a smiley-face road infrastructure – if Spore is anything to go by, phallic shaped cities are surely not far away. Everything is geared to be simple and intuitive - you can paint an outline for your industrial area, for instance, and the shape will be filled in with buildings, constructing around any roads you have already laid out.
 
A new feature is the ‘Hero’ buildings, which are constructions that range from a Japanese palace to a building that’s shaped like a giant cake- a mixture of the realistic and fantastic. These buildings then affect the area that surrounds them, effectively allowing you to create ‘districts’ like a Chinatown or even a Candytown. Once your city is built you can then take a flight to survey your work in a Wiimote controlled helicopter. This flying mini-game even offers challenges that range from running an air-ambulance, to chasing down people running away from a restaurant having not paid their bill. And no, I’m not making that up.
 
Any hardcore SimCity fans, concerned that this all sounds like unnecessary fluff, can relax. Underneath the obvious attempt to attract new players is all the depth you can expect from your favourite city-planning game, evident when Ueno flicks through a huge amount of menus, charts and various statistic screens. You can fix the tax rate, take loans, strike deals with neighbouring cities and even deal with ordinances such as legalising gambling if you fancy having your very own Vegas.
 
Then, having built your utopia, in true SimCity tradition you can smash it all down. Using the Wii remote you can rain down meteors, whip up a tornado and, er, unleash giant llamas that trample the city underfoot. Tax rates and mutant mammals - only in SimCity. As Ueno shows off all the disasters - natural or otherwise- he really begins to get into his stride. “It’s fun to smash it all down, just don’t save when you’re finished,” he says with a childish glee. There is also a mission mode that often uses disasters as part of the objective. One mission Ueno showed us was a task that required us to level a city by rolling a gigantic spiky ball over the landscape. I couldn’t help but think this is what Katamari Damacy would be like if it was made by Michael Bay. Or Satan.
 
Creator looked like a whole lot of fun, mixing silliness with all the depth you’d expect of a SimCity title. The only complaint I could muster was that, visually, it was a little drab despite the wacky buildings. This may be a necessary evil to allow the relatively underpowered Wii to cope with a teeming city, but it was hard to ignore. Still, with  Creator’s extensive toolset and seemingly intuitive controls, players with enough talent and imagination will be able to create a beautiful metropolis. No lack of graphical grunt is going to change that.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 12:13 pm by Tom Hoggins
Columns & Opinion, Early impressions, Events, Forthcoming titles.