Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: akiy@netcom.com (Jun Akiyama) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: SimLife Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 11 Aug 1993 18:03:19 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 451 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <24bc97$d9l@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: akiy@netcom.com (Jun Akiyama) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, simulation, commercial PRODUCT NAME SimLife, V1.00 Jun 18 1993 14:11:56 BRIEF DESCRIPTION Build your own ecosystem and give life to creatures, designing animals and plants down to the genetic level. Brought to you from the makers of SimCity, SimAnt, SimEarth, and SimFarm (well, on other platforms, anyway). AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Maxis, distributed by Mindscape International Address: 2 Theatre Square Suite 230 Orinda, CA 94563-3346 Telephone: (510) 254-9700 FAX: (510) 253-3736 LIST PRICE The list price as indicated in the Mindscape catalog included with the game is 34.99 pounds. (Mindscape is a British company.) Exchange rates as of this writing would make that equivalent to $59.64 (US). I was able to buy this product from a local store for $39.99 (US). SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE There are two versions of this software: one for AGA machines (A1200, A4000), and another for all Amiga computers. (From this point on in the article, unless I specifically refer to the AGA version or the Standard version, "SimLife" will refer to both AGA and Standard versions.) The AGA version has golden stickers on the box saying "A1200 Enhanced" and "Enhanced version for Amiga 1200/4000 only." The AGA version requires a machine which can handle AGA graphics such as the A1200 and the A4000. However, I do not know if AGA emulator boards (such as the Retina card) would be able to use this game. The AGA version also requires 2 MB of RAM. A hard drive is recommended. The Standard version for all Amigas requires a minimum of 1 MB of RAM (although 2 MB is recommended). A hard drive is recommended. There is a little ReadMe note on the disk for the AGA version with the following information: If you intend to play SimLife in HiRes Mode with only 2 Megabytes of RAM, you will only be able to play with Tiny and Small worlds. This is due to memory constraints. If you fit more memory, you will be able to play all configurations. I do not know if the above note also applies to the Standard version. If you don't have a hard drive, don't worry. The program can be decompressed onto three floppy disks. (Disk swapping is always so much fun, and can often relieve the tension in any program. Right?) A warning to those running on slower CPUs -- the game is quite CPU intensive! Although the game can run on any Amiga platform, I would not want to see this game running on a 68000-equipped machine as it tends to slow down even on my A4000. It has no problems running with my 68040, even with copyback mode on. Also, the AGA version runs in PAL mode, although this can be avoided (as explained later). SOFTWARE The AGA version requires Workbench 3.0 and above. The Standard version requires at least Workbench 1.3. COPY PROTECTION None. At all. Period. End of sentence. We should give Maxis a great big huzzah. Really. I did. The game installs beautifully onto a hard drive, without having to make any directory assigns. Another huzzah. The game boots from Workbench, and multitasks well, except for a few litle problems (see below for details). The game will save its data (save games, new species, etc.) using a file requester, so you have the power to place it wherever you wish. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 4000/040 2 MB Chip RAM, 4 MB Fast RAM Kickstart 39.106, Workbench 39.29 INSTALLATION As mentioned previously, the game is installable onto either the hard drive or onto three floppies. As in most Maxis games, SimLife comes in two different resolutions: hi-res, or low-res. The hi-res version is recommended for those with at least 2 MB of memory, and a multiscan monitor. (I guess the multiscan monitor is necessary to eliminate the flicker through DblPAL. The Standard version, although it does not use DblPAL, may use a flicker fixer instead.) Installation itself is a breeze. The installation program is started by booting up Disk 1, after which you will be asked whether you wish to have hi-res or low-res graphics and to install onto either the hard drive (in which case it also asks for a directory, creating it if necessary) or floppy drive. Then follow the on-screen instructions on which of the four disks the program wants, and after minimal disk-swapping, the game is installed. GETTING STARTED When starting up the game from Workbench, you must not leave any windows open which have tasks running. The requester saying "Could not close Workbench. Close all windows and restart!" will pop up. This means, for example, that you must not have any shells, GNU Emacs windows, nor ASokoban games running at the time you start the game. After you close the windows or iconify them, double click on the not-too attractive game icon, and start the game again. Once you start the game, you will notice a depth gadget at the top right hand corner; don't bother using it, as I found it does nothing. Use the Left-Amiga M combination to flip through the screens to get back to Workbench if you need to multitask. Be forewarned that the game takes up a lot of CPU cycles, and most everything else will be pretty slow. One of the first things you notice when you first boot the hi-res AGA version is that it's in DblPAL mode. (I don't know what the Standard version does.) For those people running in PAL, this is not a problem; for those of us running NTSC, the bottom 25% of the screen is clipped off. I use the public domain commodity ForceMonitor to promote all PAL screens to Multiscan:Productivity (my Workbench resolution), and the program seems to work fine. You might have to press Left-Amiga M to flip the screen sometimes to bring the SimLife screen to the front. In addition, if you're using a DblNTSC Workbench and wish to use SimLife AGA in DblNTSC, ForceMonitor can do that too; just be aware that you'll need to autoscroll a little bit to see the entire screen. (I also installed the low-res AGA version, and the screen opens up in PAL mode. Therefore, the same steps as above will probably have to be taken to open up a full-size screen.) After installation, the first instinct of all human beings having used a computer for more than five minutes is to dive into a program without having read the manual. Usually, only after the user has looked at all the menu items, pressed all the buttons, and basically gotten confused and frustrated do they open the manuals. In SimLife, looking at all the menu items and pressing all the buttons take a really long time, and getting confused and frustrated takes a very short one. Luckily, Maxis includes a pretty comprehensive tutorial. The tutorial world makes the user go through all of the basic functions of all of the menu items and buttons, so that the user can understand the 204 page user manual better afterwards. I thought the tutorial to be very helpful and well organized, although I found the "Click on window to continue" prompts a bit irritating. (The windows kept disappearing on me, since you're all wrapped up in placing Lucia's Llamas all across the land and clicking away, during which the window suddenly pops up and you inadvertently "Click on the window to continue." Of course, there's the "Redisplay Current Message" menu item, but it's still annoying, nonetheless.) GAME PLAY The game itself revolves basically around observation. It is no horrendously thumb-numbing shoot-'em up game, nor is it a mind-wrenching dungeon-delving adventure. (Only BLAZEMONGER can be both at the same time, and then some. :-)) Most of the time, I found myself influencing the world in some manner, then waiting to see what happened in reaction to it. I guess if there is a god, that's what he's doing at this moment. However, don't take this in the wrong way; you wouldn't buy this game if you wished for action, adventure, blood, guts, and glory. You're going to have to be pretty patient with this game; it takes a long time for something to happen, just like in real evolution! Don't expect your humpback whales to start walking on land in one minute; it takes a lot longer than that. Sit back, and observe, young ones. First, you create the earth upon which your creatures and plants will reside. Such parameters as average moisture, average temperature, numbers of rivers and lakes (and seas -- no distinction between salt and fresh water), and even the numbers of toxins and mutagens can be configured. Don't worry if the world you get doesn't suit your godly aesthetic sense; during the game itself, you can raise or sink land (a la Populous) and increase or decrease rain fall and temperature. Heck, spell your name with a land mass. You also get to choose the size of the world -- tiny, small, large, medium, and large. Continental drift does not seem to be integrated into this game, but I'm sure you can emulate it through ingenious manipulations of the land. After creating your landmasses, it's time to place your plants and creatures. The program gives several options on how to place them. You can place individual creatures wherever you wish (which is very close to painting with a paint program with a brush with the grid turned on), or you can have the program place creatures for you; the options available for you to control the computer's placement of the creatures include placing them in a group or individually scattered, on land only, in water only, or any other combination. You can also choose to place individual species or the entire catalog of plants or animals onto the map. (Of course, you can place those humpback whales on land, if you wish, or throw some ground squirrels into the water; either way, you are punished (rewarded?) by a pretty quick "Oooh" sound, signaling the demise of some of your creations.) Each one of these species consists of a group of settings corresponding to the creature's (or plant's) biological descriptions. For example, you can control whether your animal will be a high intelligence carnivore which walks and lives in the mountains and has a long gestation time but few children (like a llama), or if it will be a low intelligence filter-feeder which flies and lives in the ocean with a short gestation time and bears many children (like something from a cheap B movie). Also, you can design the picture of the creature/plant in child/seed and adult/plant modes, so you can distinguish them on the screen easily. You decide. Yes, it can get pretty silly, but I think that's one of the features of the game. Even during the game, you can pick out each animal on the screen and change its genome features. You can make one of those llamas to suddenly turn into a flying super-stealthy acute-visioned fly-sized animal, if you want. Make that humpback whale asexual! Create some immortal chickens! The program will keep track of each and every single living creature on your earth. As the days pass by, the seasons roll past, and the years flit away into history, you get to watch evolution in action as animals and plants mutate into different species. If you're feeling bored, you can really play divinity and fly a comet into the earth, induce a plague, introduce a sexually transmitted disease, or even (gasp!) bring civilization onto the land (whereupon little bulldozers start appearing, creating luxury homes and leaving pollution behind them)! While you're at it, you can start to change the basic physics of nature on your planet. If you suddenly feel that seeds should have more food value than animals, you can do so. You have total freedom to make flying take less movement costs than walking, or to raise the mutation rate. It's all up to you. Of course, all this would go to naught if the program didn't keep track of what happened when, and all other records. The game keeps track of when what species was introduced, what is eating what, the population of each species, diversity graphs, and basically all of the data a biologist would love to have on an ecosystem. Yes, there are many, many settings and variables you can change, but who said life was uncomplicated? DOCUMENTATION There are three manuals included with the game: the user manual, the SimLife lab book, and the addendum and quickstart guide. The user guide is a comprehensive 204 page text, complete with glossary and an index (which deserves the third huzzah). Many illustrations grace the pages of this manual to ease identification of the many windows, buttons, and menus in the game. All in all, I found it to be very easy to use. There is also an addendum and "quickstart" guide for the Amiga version of the game which tells you of the installation procedures and a keyboard shortcut chart in the back. Lastly, there is a SimLife lab book in which you are to "make a photocopy of it for your personal use and mark that up. No selling copies of the lab book in dark alleys to minors while wearing a trench coat." Basically, this lab book allows you to record the various settings of the program. Will I ever use it? I don't think so. If you see someone selling copies of it in dark alleys to minors while *not* wearing a trench coat, it's probably some other pervert. Not me. LIKES, DISLIKES, AND OPINIONS I really like the premises upon which this product was built. The idea of watching life evolve and being able to observe (and influence) directly the interactions of different species ("You scratch my back, and I'll eat you") can only be done on computers (for now). However, for a non-biologically oriented person like me, I felt pretty overwhelmed by the number of options, settings, and variables presented before me. Now, I'm not saying that this is a drawback necessarily (although the "However" at the beginning of the paragraph may say otherwise); it's just that sometimes, simple is best. For people who want to sit around for hours, twiddling each little gene and adjusting settings, then loading, saving, then recording each session, this program may be ideal. However, I did not have the patience to sit out decades and decades of artificial time to see what happened to a species of plant. I suppose I could play this game at a more shallow level without getting into the specifics (like manipulating the genes for water storage in a plant), but then, I would feel as though I'm not playing the game to the fullest. Maybe it's just me. I don't know. Therefore, for those people who enjoy working with many variables, and would like to have the power (and time) to adjust nearly each and every aspect of life, this game is for you. For others, it may be a type of diversion close to a fractal program; you can watch a lot of things moving on the screen, then come back a few hours later and check the history to see what's still alive and when things went extinct. Perhaps if there were some real "scoring" mechanism for SimLife as there was for SimCity (in which money was a limited resource; in SimLife, life itself can be created pretty much infinitely, and without any cost, which I find pretty unrealistic), the game could be more playable. Although the "physics" aspect of the game limits the player somewhat, the game play is hindered by allowing the player simply to say "poof" and add some more animals here and delete some plants here. In addition to the built-in scenarios, included in the directory itself are several "saved" games which are interesting. For example, one of the scenarios is as follows: The main workers are the Square Pegs, who chase the Round Wholes, and Marketers, who chase Customers. Money Trees, with golden flowers that give off a red scent, are the main food source for the workers. The Water Bottles are where the workers congregate and drink. The Executive Wash Room/Lounge (in the lower left corner) is where the executives congregate, drink and use the trees. Everyone wants to catch the Runnin' BigBucks, but they are hard to catch -- they avoid everyone but upper management. Everyone has grass growing under their feet, but tries to hide it, or at least eat it. The shopping carts are the candy dispensers and popcorn machines. Upper Management sits around and waits for the BigBucks to come. The game is an obvious port from the Macintosh platform, as the requesters are taken right from the Macintosh operating system. I found some of these requesters annoying, probably because I'm used to seeing Workbench compliant programs these days. The game play is hindered at points because of this noncompliance, as some menus (such as from the Help button) do not pop up readily, meaning you may have to click on a button multiple times, which is irritating. Because the game is pretty slow at times, the reaction time of a button press may be delayed. Maybe more care could have been taken by the people at Maxis to round out the user interface to that more suitable for the Amiga, and not just supposed that the Macintosh interface would suffice for the picky tastes of some Amiga users (myself included). I think it would have sped things up a little bit too. Lastly, let me try to warn a few people. I don't think you're going to be able to use this program to recreate the movie Jurassic Park. (There are no omnivorous animals, so it'd be hard to create humans in the first place. And, no using "frog" DNA in dinosaurs, either.) Nor do I think you are going to be able to recreate life on earth as it is today, because of such limitations. Perhaps with a lot of patience and time, you might be able to; but then again, a game is a game. Maybe Maxis will come out with SimInteractionBetweenHumansAndOtherBeingsOnEarth someday. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS Of course, in comparing this game with the other "Sim" games, I think that this game is the most "simulation"-like than the other "Sim" games. As said above, unlike SimCity, there are really no limited resources, and there is really no big objective in SimLife. SimAnt had an objective to take over the entire yard. SimEarth gave the objective of evolving a lifeform intelligent enough to go to another solar system. I guess that the main objective of SimLife would be to create a stable ecosystem through the creation of your own lifeforms. Maybe it's just me. I just might not have the patience to sit this one through. BUGS It seemed as though there was a strange bug when the program used the "autospeciate" feature to create a new species from an old one (when organisms diverge so much from their originals that they wouldn't be able to mate with the old ones) and the user deleted some of the organisms (or did something that irritated the program), the pictures for each of the organisms shifted around, the wrong image representing some of the species. Therefore, I sometimes saw sharks flying across mountains, and squirrels suddenly turned into humpback whales when it walked to the left. I haven't contacted Maxis about this, as I'm not really too sure when this occurs (except for the aforementioned approximate details). If anything ensues, I'll submit a followup article. VENDOR SUPPORT I have never talked to anyone at Maxis, as far as I know, unless they have undercover agents or something. The registration card has to be sent to England (to Mindscape), and the technical support hotline is an international call. However, I'd think calling Maxis directly (in California) would be better, so take a look at the phone numbers up above for details. I am in no way, shape nor form, associated with Maxis. I just play their games (or rather, run their simulations). WARRANTY Sending in the registration card entitles the user to "technical support, advance notification of upgrades, and special offers on future Mindscape products," says the registration card. CONCLUSIONS All in all, I feel SimLife to be a very accomplished simulation with a whole plethora of variables and a world of outcomes to be explored. On a scale from one to ten ducks (one duck being the equivalent to "Pond Scum," and ten ducks garnering a "Totally ducky!" description), I'd probably give it seven ducks. COPYRIGHT NOTICE I hereby relinquish the copyrights to this review to Daniel Barrett, as he is such a cool guy and posts funny articles to Usenet. Whatever he wishes to do with my inane words, he is free to do so. So nyaah. BLAZEMONGER NOTICE For you BLAZEMONGER II players out there, this review, in its entirety (including the headers), is the secret password for level 323,832,123.021. Just type it in during the .00002 millisecond title screen, and you're there. Wow. How did the BLAZEMONGER programmers know? --- UCLA undergrad trying to [] "Denn des Anchauns, siehe, ist eine Grenze graduate and get a job [] Und die geschautere Welt will in after studying NLP at [] der Liebe gedeihn." Tokyo Inst. of Tech. [] -- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Wendung" A --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews