It seems to be a trend for porting or remaking a lot of classic games lately so it wasn’t really a surprise when EA announced that they were going to bring Sim City to the DS. The stylus supported portable console seems to be the perfect choice for this old classic sim released mainly for the PC. Based on “Sim City 3000” which was released for the PC back in 1999 you could really call this a remake with added features such as action events and a museum for viewing all the buildings available in the game. So does the giant city simulator work on the tiny screens of the DS? Lets find out.

There are basically two main modes you can play as with all Sim City games; a free mode named “Build a New City” where you pick a piece of land and build away as long as you want and, a scenario based “Save the City” which is objective based.

The top screen is basically used to display the surface view of your city while the bottom is where all the action is. The control system actually works out pretty well on the tiny DS screen although placing new things can take a little getting used to first. There are only two levels of zoom, one high up from the land and one close up to the buildings. Zooming in helps place things more accurately without making mistakes but because of the small screen, you can struggle a little when placing large zones.


Laying out the city on the small DS screen takes a little getting used to.
Fortunately, it’s still fairly easy to place things when zoomed out or if you prefer larger views, you can actually use the D-Pad to scroll around too. The development team has also added some other small features to help minimise your mistakes such as an undo button. The game pauses whenever you’re placing down anything new so changes don’t actually take place until you exit planning mode. The common mistake of accidentally placing roads across area plans has also been addressed now because you can’t actually build over marked areas.

Apart from the obvious control interfaces and omission of cheats via the keyboard, Sim City DS also has several other big changes to it and it’s mainly in gameplay.

The first thing you’ll come across when you start a city on your brand new game is a series of questions. Much like some of the RPGs out there which uses such questions to pick a class for you, here they help you to choose the right advisor and there are quite a lot of them. Mr. Maxim (probably Will Wright) is the main general advisor while the others try to fulfil different roles such as Ayako who likes to look after the environment more. As you would expect, these advisors give advice whenever you tap on them.