This game captivated me as a kid, and even as an adult, it’s such a fascinating experiment. The closest thing to it I can really think of is Dwarf Fortress. Are there any other retro games really like SimEarth? (Spore doesn’t count, even if it was /vr/)Anyone else enjoyed SimEarth as well? I’d love to hear some stories.
>>12005262I played it a lot. It's something half way between an educational program and a game. Kind of in the tradition of kids playing Oregon Trail at school, but more objectively educational. I think you will find more similar entries in that domain than in games in general.
I played the SNES one a lot as a kid. I too found it fascinating. The SNES can barely run it, but some of the audiovisual decorations are nice. I seem to remember that the hardware could barely manage to save the state of a game - it'd take a long time to save, and then when you loaded, you'd find that all your creatures were scattered randomly around the world, as if storing their actual locations would have taken up too much room in the cartridge and so had to be skipped. Can anybody confirm that I'm not misremembering this? I mean I'll replay it myself one of these days, but I don't feel like it just now
>Are there any other retro games really like SimEarth?Evolution: The Game of Intelligent Life
>>12005262I liked it. I don't remember too many stories other than trying to manipulate events so that weird things would happen (like a Trichordate Space Age).
Reportedly players shipped save disks to Maxis, asking to explain what did they do wrong to reach failure states, only to receive letters from Will Wright saying that he himself had no idea how the game really worked.
>>12006103Such is the nature of emergent behavior.
>>12005490This reminded me of Gungan Frontier
As a kid new, sim earth was little too deep. I was pretty bummed out, and as an adult it's not great and I love me my old sim games. Am I missing something? Sim Ant is still a hoot as a40 year old.
>>12007558>a40 year oldwhat the fuck
>>12007562I'm old
>>12007567how does it feel?
>>12007570could be worse desu, I'm going grey but not losing hair. I'm in pretty good shape but my sports college injuries are taking a toll. I'm shit posting on /vr/ at midnight my time life' not bad.
>>12007571>my sports college injuries are taking a tollI just think you should know, they don't wear leather helmets anymore, mr. oldy moldyI do know that feel tho. following a lifetime of blue collar labor, my knees now sound like Velcro whenever I bend them
>>12005262Uhh, probably populous on snes
>>12007578hahah, I played rugby we had no pads aside like a swimming cap so we didn't get califlower ear. Beats paying for college. I moved to help pay for grad school so I know the suffering, I wish you nothing but good vidya and comfy. I'm now an office monkey and I creak a lot.
>>12005490OP here, I had this game at one point and totally forgot about it. Thanks for unlocking a memory.
Umm... SimLife? It's basically the same as SimEarth, just on a smaller scale.
>>12008082SimLife is cool but it’s about, well, life. The neat thing about SimEarth was the entire planetary model.
>>12007562You must be at least 30 years old to post to 4chan.
Is there an audience for this sort of thing these days? Always wanted to build a model like this.
>>12008082>>12008242I've played SimLife, but never SimEarth. I should really give SimEarth a try.
>>12005262I really enjoy playing this every now and then in Basilisk II. I prefer the Mac version of this and other early Maxis titles given the superior graphics and sounds.
>>12009280I have a physical CIB mac copy of Sim Life, and it's pretty neat.
This game was great because it explored the somewhat far-out idea of viewing the planet itself as an organism, and allowed people to play with that as a premise. It was a collaboration between phisophy and the new media of computer games, it inspired people to think. It was fun, you discovered what happened as you played, and how the game behaved, emergent gameplay they now call it. But it was new then.These days a game like this would never be made by a big studio.
>>12009280Interesting, I grew up playing the Mac version and had no idea it was considered superiour to the DOS version. As a kid with a Mac in the 90s, most of the games I have nostalgia for are like weird off-brand knockoffs of better games, so this is a rare victory heh.
>>12009260There’s a similar game being developed (in early access now) called Planetary Life, so I think there absolutely is an audience, even if it’s not huge. You should do it, anon. The planetary formation model in Dwarf Fortress is one of the most fascinating parts imo.
I never played this as a kid, but I've had this and SimAnt sitting in my rom folder for years. I tried to play them a couple times but quickly realized I needed a PhD or the manual but haven't bothered to get either. Still, I'm intrigued by a game where you're fucking building Earth.
>>12009851Yeah, you can just tell by comparison that the palettes are brighter, more colourful and generally more fitting in the Mac versions of those old Maxis games. They were the versions Will Wright worked on, then other people at Maxis handled the DOS/Windows ports. The ports really aren't awful, but you can tell they weren't the lead platform and that some of the graphics and sounds got a bit muddled in the process.
>>12005262i could never manage to keep things in balance and always ended up making earth too hot or too cold and everything died. i wasn't very good at simearth. i bet the pc version was better than the snes version that i played. maybe it was the suggestions from nintendo power magazine that screwed me up. i love maxis games and played a whole bunch of them. i'm a pro at simcity. honestly i preferred 'the game of life' to simearth because of its simplicity.
>>12009880Whoa, I’ve played it on PC since my childhood and it never looked exactly how I remembered, I just assumed that was due to CRTs and faded memory. This looks EXACTLY how I remember it!I don’t even know the last time I played SimAnt, I should set up Basilisk II.
>>12009891>I should set up Basilisk IIWould highly recommend. https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5282For all those interested
I loved it as a kid and got really into it and would just replay it all the time. Tried replaying it a few years ago and got so confused and had no idea what to do so I gave up>>12005475Yes, that save thing is true. It would take like 5 minutes but everything would return to where it was once after a bit. Loading saves were always jumbled for a few minutes
>>12009861the strategy for SimAnt is different than you would expect. you can go around digging nests and gathering food and fighting red ants to your heart's content, but the way to win is to get as many breeder ants as you can flying to new map squares as quickly as possible. you can't win the war against the red ants by micromanaging the battles, you just have to outbreed them.
>>12009880Maxis was a Mac-first company.
>>12009916Will Wright confirmed the first Macfag???
>>12010031It kind of suited the "educational toy" games he was interested in making. Apple seemed to be the computer of choice in schools, I remember seeing Apple IIs gradually replaced by iMac G3s over the years. It was not uncommon to see Maxis games installed on school computers along with other staples like Oregon Trail or Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.
>>12005262I rented this once on SNES as a kid. Zero fucking clue what to do and I was stuck with it all weekend. I never figured it out so I just used the Unlimited mode or whatever it was called to make a cool RPG-style map out of the different biomes.
>>12005490This one seems difficult to get working properly on modern hardware. Might need a VM
