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John Cletheroe's
USA and Canada Holiday Hints |
SimPark is primarily aimed at children and the game has a considerable educational element. However, interested adults will also obtain considerable enjoyment and probably quite a large amount of knowledge from playing it.
You are put in charge of a park. This is not a small park in the middle of a town but a huge American or Canadian wilderness park - a National Park, National Monument, State Park or Provincial Park. You can choose the geographical region for your park within the USA, which determines its climate and therefore the types of plants and animals which are likely to thrive there. You can also choose from various park maps, each with a different layout of land and water.
You are then presented with a scrollable view of your park, devoid of any features other than the water. This is perhaps the most unrealistic element of the game's design, since in real life the parks had an abundance of flora and fauna when they were created (although a small number, such as Shenandoah, were not in a natural state when they were formed).
You choose which plants and animals to put into your park and where they should be sited. The animals, of course, can wander about. You can choose from a wide variety of trees, shrubs, flowers, grasses, mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. The educational aspect of the game becomes apparent at this stage. You quickly have to learn whether each species will survive in your park's climate and how the various species interact with each other.
Although you receive regular government funding each January, you will also probably want to attract human visitors to your park in order to supplement your income. Apart from developing a wide variety of species, this is also done by providing various facilities such as paths, campsites, benches, drinking fountains, picnic tables and so on. A very surprising omission here is the complete lack of an option to build visitor centres. There are no options to create roads or car parks. An extremely important but none too obvious point to be aware of is the need to ensure that paths connect with the correct sides of the various human oriented facilities, otherwise they will not be used. When correctly connected with paths, you will see human beings start to use the facilities - for example, children will swing on the swings and slide down the slides.
Your park covers a huge area but you can scroll around quickly using the compass at the top right of the screen. Alternatively you can switch to a map of the whole park and click on it to jump quickly to a particular place that needs your attention.
On both the normal view and the overall map you can switch the display of each type of feature (trees, mammals, human facilities, etc) on or off.
Options are available to obtain various species statistics and budget information showing your park's development. There is also a species recognition game which you have to play in order to win promotion, a field guide which provides information about each species and a game which involves the recognition of bird songs. You even receive simulated EMail from your boss and other park employees. You can also use a "microphone" option to listen to comments from your park's visitors and inhabitants; this also aids in species identification.
Your park can suffer from simulated disasters such as a fire or the rapid spread of a wild grass called kudzu. There is an option to eliminate the possibility of disasters occurring.
The scenic aspects of your park are completely ignored in SimPark. All the possible parks are completely flat. Instead, the game's designers have quite reasonably decided to concentrate on the plants and animals living in the park.
The game is quite enjoyable to play but perhaps not one which will sustain interest for a great deal of time. The lack of a clear objective, other than developing and ensuring the survival of a wide diversity of species, is one drawback.
The quality of the programming is generally excellent. With a few minor exceptions it is generally quite easy to work out how the game's controls work. The simulation runs very quickly even when there are huge numbers of plants, animals and human visitors in your park. Seeing how the trees, plants and flowers grow and change with the seasons of the year is wonderful, as are the sound effects and the activities of the visitors.
The main problem with the game is its underlying rather dubious assumption that your park is better off with human management than without it. This is made even more artificial by each park initially being devoid of any plants or animals. However, it is difficult to see how a game of this nature could have been designed which didn't make this assumption, after all the person playing the game has to make some decisions and take some actions.
The game's main positive feature is that it will help in learning about the various species, how they fare in various climates and how they interact. Despite the various relatively minor reservations expressed above, this alone makes the game extremely worthwhile.
Do not confuse SimPark, which simulates the management of a wildlife/wilderness park, with another similarly named game also published by Maxis which simulates the management of a theme park (i.e. an amusement park). I think the other game might be called ThemePark.
You may have search quite extensively to find a copy of SimPark. It does not seem to be widely available, at least in Britain.
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Most recently modified 20-Nov-98