Sim Games!

I loved Sim games growing up. I had all the classics - SimCity, SimTower, SimFarm, SimAnt. I think the very first Sim game I played was SimAnt. Pretty simple, perhaps (some might say boring), but it was a lot of fun at the time. In this game, you play as an ant in a new colony of ants in a backyard. Your job, at first, is to gather food to take back to your colony. There are 3 types of ants - worker, soldier, and queen. You can switch to any other ant in the colony at any time. As a soldier, you can fight the red ants for control of this space in the backyard. Your goal is to ultimately take over the entire backyard, and then the house. 

BTW, you can actually play this game in your browser, along with a lot of other cool older games here.

SimFarm was another one I enjoyed. It's actually pretty similar to Farmville, interestingly. You're a farmer in charge of a farm. You build buildings, plant crops, tend livestock. Every crop and every animal has specific conditions in which it can thrive, and it's up to you to make sure that they do.

SimTower was probably my favorite. It's pretty simple, you build up a big tower with all kinds of things in it - office spaces, hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, apartments. You have to make sure the residents of your tower maintain happiness by doing things like having numerous quick elevators, a trash system, escalators, sufficient parking and transportation, etc.  I really really wish I could find a way to play this on my computer, but alas, my old CD-ROM doesn't work on my MacBook.

In Sim City, you control more than just a tower, you control a whole city. You build up industrial, residential, and commercial development zones, as well as roads and transportation. Probably the coolest part were the disasters that could befall your town, either at random or at your own whim. Tornados, floods, or monsters could tear your town to shreds.

After these, of course, came The Sims. I was super into The Sims for quite a while. It was so incredibly advanced for the time, and yet it's far more primitive than the version of the Sims they have out now! It's interesting how the games have gone from a tiny ant, to a whole building, to a whole city, and then to the people living in that city. It's kind of astonishing how far the technology has come. From controlling ants in an ant colony to controlling people's lives!