SimTower
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Today's game is a DOS game, and you will most likely need DOS-Box to run them!
I can clearly remember the day I got this game because I was given it as a gift along with SimCity2000. Of course, I took one look at SimTower and sat down to play SimCity. After about two weeks playing SimCity with no success I finally sat down to play SimTower expecting to find the Sim... idea stretched to its extremes, so I was surprised to find SimTower so entertaining and enjoyable.
Anyway, enough memories. The aim of SimTower is to build a hundred story tower block filled with offices, condos, shops, restaurants,a hotel, a cinema and a party hall. Your tower will also need a medical centre, good security, adequate parking and good recycling facilities. The eventual aim is to place a cathedral on the top and win the game.
At the start of SimTower you only have the option to build offices, cafes and condos. I would advise offices as the best place to start as they bring in a weekly rent and the occupants will not be as fussy as those who move into your condos. If you do choose to build condos keep them well away from your offices as the residents will not like the noise of the workers coming and going. Once you have been upgraded to a two-star tower, a hotel is the way to advance. Where offices pay rent by the week, hotel rooms pay by the night so you will see money come in much quicker.
Remember that everyone in your tower is an individual with feelings. If you have 1200 people trying to get into 1 elevator people are going to get stressed. Fortunately, if you have the money, you can put up to 8 elevator cars in one shaft (sounds dangerous to me!) which will reduce those stress levels.
At weekends the office workers will not be in the tower but the shops, restaurants etc. will still be open so think about placing them close to the ground floor, maybe underground. That way people arriving at your tower on a Saturday will not have to take a 80 story elevator ride to get a cup of tea.
There are also a number of random events that can occur, some good, others not so good. Terrorists may bomb your tower so make sure your security is adequate to find any bomb. A security centre is best covering only 6 floors but will be adequate for about 15. After that you will need to build more. On the brighter side you will sometimes find buried treasure when building underground. If not, just look forward to your yearly visit from Santa.
The interface is a fairly standard set of windows. Nothing to get excited about but it does the job well. The graphics are intended to be more functional than good looking but they actually succeed as both. The sound is ok but so basic that you will probably turn it off before long.
While the gameplay is good and of a very high quality there are a few things that weaken the game a little. A three-star rating is fairly simple to get, though it will take a while, but a four-star rating will take so long that you will probably get bored and give up before you get there. When you get to the third lobby at floor 60, you will suddenly find that it is nearly impossible to get an elevator to it because they will all reach their maximum length on floor 59. The game has two speeds. When you open the game it will be in fast mode which is ridiculously fast. Disable this under the options menu and you will find the game is now ridiculously slow. My only solution was to build in normal mode and then switch on fast mode until I wanted to build again.
There is still a lot to this game that I haven't covered, mostly little details that make it even more enjoyable. This game is not one that you will want to play everyday but it is great fun and if you hold on to it is a good game to come back to when you are bored of everything else.
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Download:
http://www.abandonia.com/en/downloadgame/341
Pictures:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/macintosh/simtower-the-vertical-empire/screenshots
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Ford Simulator 5
Ford Simulator 5 has to be one of the silliest games I have ever played. In my opinion, it is one the weakest attempts at public endorsement I have ever seen.
In a rare move in 1989, Ford Motor company teamed up with the computer industry in order to make a game that would attract young customers and influence them to buy their new cars. The result: Ford Simulator. Ford ended up making 6 games: one for every year from 1989 to 1995. Each game was exactly the same in playability: simply different cars and graphics each year. All but the last game were made to run in DOS. Ford obviously must have made a lot of money off of these games, or they would probably not have continued making them.
The game is dull and repetitive. The main menu consists of a list of all the Ford and Ford spin-off company’s cars for that year. You can see cars in all the colors they come in, plus a nifty little profile of the all the car’s statistics. As you can see, the game is packed with consumer information. When you click PLAY! You choose a level: beginner or advanced. After that, you are presented with a much smaller list of about 15 cars to choose from (it doesn’t matter, they are all pretty much the same). When you get on the roadway you have one object: get to Lake Wakatonka as fast as you can.
There are, of course, obstacles: policemen (if you go too fast you get a ticket - 3 tickets, and your out) and crashes. If you crash into pretty much anything you may get a POW! If you get 4 POW!s, you get a CRUNCH! And you die.
Updater's remark: Every now and again you will see a huge blue truck in front of you. If you drive behind it it will fix one of those POWs.
Every once in a while, you can stop at a gas station. After you pay for your gas (the game worries about money for you, don’t worry) you always have one dollar left over. You can buy stuff (drink, candy, map, nothing). I recommend a map, as you can use it to figure out where you are going. When you get to Lake Wakatonka, you win. The End.
Graphics
Colorful and sickeningly sweet, almost like a cartoon. The cartoon image is also upheld when you crash; a large POW! Flashes across your screen. All in all, they are mediocre for the year, 1994.
Sound
When played in DOSBOX, the sounds are just beeps and whistles like Artoo-Detoo. When played on Windows, the sounds come from your PC speaker in the form of horrible static and buzzes.
Controls
No thinking involved. Up arrow to accelerate, down to brake, left and right to steer, Space bar to click through menus. Note about driving though - the driving simulation state is ridiculously sluggish. When I was driving, I felt like a drunkard, weaving in and out of the curbs. The car handles like a hippopotamus.
Technical Stuff
Installation of this game is a little strange. When you get the file, unzip it and click install. Click your way through the process, and when you are done, go to your C: / drive and click FORD. When you get there, click Ford and it should start playing.
In Conclusion, I give this game a 2, because most people probably would play the game once and then forget about it. There is nothing addictive about the plot or the drive handling. I suppose if you like Ford cars, download this, but for the amount of money Ford Motors has, they could have made this game state of the art. The first game, made in 1989, was great for its time, but the games never really got better. The screen is heavily pixilated, and the sounds are elementary. It is also very unrealistic, because you have to crash into four 18-wheelers at 100 miles per hour to finally die, and the fact that you have to get gas every 5 minutes is also annoying. I'm surprised Ford didn't realise that its not really the right message to send about their cars. Ford Simulator 5 is a mediocre game, but it could have been much, much more.
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Download:
http://www.abandonia.com/en/downloadgame/550
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