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The Tower SP

Posted April 4th 2006 by Stephanie DeSiena.

Have you ever wondered what it's like to manage a four-star, 47-story building while being over $400,000 in debt? Well, now you can finally see what it's like for yourself! The Tower SP - the latest game from Yutaka "Yoot" Saito and his team known as Vivarium – contains all of the non-stop thrills of creating and managing a skyscraper that you've been waiting for. This title is an updated port of SimTower (as it was known in America), a game that made Yoot Saito a household name when it was released back in 1994. Maxis, the publisher, had decided to change the name when localizing it in order to keep it in the vein of their famous "Sim" series. Despite the name change, SimTower was a departure from the normal Sim game because of its simplistic, yet unique design.

For those of us unfamiliar with the original SimTower, The Tower SP keeps the same basics that made the original game so fun and addictive. You start off with a fair chunk of change which you must use in order to begin building a tower from the ground up. As you place commercial, business, and residential rooms within your building, people begin to populate it. The game begins by encouraging you to build offices, which provide a steady source of income. Once people start moving in and buying out the offices, you are expected to supply the building with various other establishments that will keep the office workers happy, such as fast food restaurants, cleaning services, and the ever-important bathroom facilities.

As more money is earned, you can expand on your tower more and more until eventually you get a high enough population in order to upgrade. The upgrading system is indicated by how many stars your building has; stars are accumulated as the population within your building grows. Upgrading your building gets you a small pay-off, a land expansion, and a variety of new items for you to build to attract more customers. Eventually, you can upgrade to highest level - the Tower rating - and you're given another smaller building to work with. Even after you achieve the highest possible rating in the game, you can continue to work on your building for as long as you'd like.

Of course, the taste of success isn't nearly as good without the reality of ulcer-inducing challenges, and Vivarium threw in a nearly overwhelming amount of scenarios that will try to stunt your progress. If you don't have enough security, you may receive bomb threats and vandalism. If a bomb isn't found quick enough, you might wind up losing a portion of your tower. If your elevators become overwhelmed with people, you may find yourself repairing broken-down shafts. Fires can also break out and, if you don't have the proper cleaning resources, you may find your building becoming roach infested.

In fact, much of the game works based on this cause-and-effect system. Office workers will demand fast food places, and they will want banks to be places near their offices instead of thirty floors above them. hotel guests will demand saunas, and probably never use them. The game provides you with a number of different businesses, each having its different target demographics. Manly men will want to shop in a Men's Shop, whereas dainty women and men without testosterone will want to check out the flower shops and boutiques. Young people get slammed at the pubs and middle-aged Japanese salesmen will want to check out the sushi restaurants. And everyone loves pet shops, unless they have souls made of pure darkness and hatred; these people don't belong in my friendly tower.

You will need to utilize all of these different types of items to your advantage as you build the perfect tower for your boss, a wrinkly old mustached man simply known as Yamanouchi, or "Yama" as his friends call him. This aspect is different from the original game, which simply threw you into a wide-open field after the start menu with no real direction. The Tower SP begins with a very lengthy and detailed tutorial that you will most likely skip after figuring out how to properly navigate the menus. The menu system had to be drastically altered in order for a proper GBA adaptation, but it stayed true to the general layout of the PC version's menus. The limited space available on the GBA screen meant that there was no way Vivarium was going to get the detailed playing field, a smaller navigation map, and the game's item menu all on one screen, but everything is easily available just as you might remember it just by tapping the shoulder buttons. Pressing R once will bring you to the item menu, while pressing it twice will allow you to enter evaluation mode – which lets you check on how happy (or frighteningly enraged) your tenants are. In addition to steady incomes provided by your hotels, offices, shops, and other places, you must pay daily and quarterly maintenance fees in order to keep your tower running smoothly.

Quarters are divided up into three days – two weekdays and a weekend. Specific events can happen on specific days. For example, the office cleaning crew will go throughout the entire tower cleaning offices and toilets every weekend. If toilets aren't properly cleaned, your tenants will begin to complain - and who can blame them? Yama also comes to inspect your tower and give you tips every so often, but only on the second weekday of the quarter. Days are split up into 24-hour in-game sessions, and time passes by quicker, or slower, depending on how crucial the time of day is for development. For example, time might move at a steady pace during the peak commercial hours of the afternoons, but early mornings will fly by. Holding down the A button will speed time up, and it is something that you will be doing frequently, so mind the hand cramps.

As I mentioned earlier in my summarized instruction manual, The Tower SP has cozy little design traits that make the game unique and playable. You watch the individual facilities in your tower throughout the day in real time. Each and every person within the tower is accounted for in one way or another, and you can see this take place through the day. When you break the thousand-person mark, this thought becomes a bit surreal. You can watch people zip up and down the elevators, walk form their offices to get some dinner or visit other residents, among other things.

The characters themselves are faceless; little shadowed pixellated versions of men, women, and children will rush about through your building. If you look at the individually drawn facilities within your building throughout the day, you'll notice people in offices, maids cleaning up hotel rooms, families checking out open houses for your condos, bustling cafés – a whole slew of nice little animations that help purvey the huge scope of the game. Sometimes you'll notice a lone double hotel room that simply isn't happy with their conditions among a sea of perfectly content patrons. When you go to check the individual occupants of the room – a 40 year old couple – each person has an astronomical stress level. Did they get into a fight? Are they only renting out the room because they have a funeral to go to in the morning? Or maybe their daughter is marrying some dead-beat loser whom they do not approve of, but can't stop her from doing so anyway because it's her life and the parents just can't comprehend true love? This is much like real life – everyone you pass may be faceless, but each has their own story. This is clearly the sentiment that the designers wanted to portray within their compact reinterpretation of a fast, unwieldy life.

The animations you'll see throughout all of this are charming and the graphics are very sharp on a normal GameBoy Advance screen. However, upon popping it into my GameBoy Player for some larger-screen action, the game's graphics looked very pixellated and choppy, even on the GameBoy Player's smoothest setting (although it looked exceptional on the GameBoy Micro). Although the visuals definitely get the point across enough to be a respectable handheld game, don't expect any type of groundbreaking graphical flare that we saw so frequently in mid-1990s PC games (a bit of sarcasm there - ha ha!).

Audibly, the game shines. If you love the original opening fanfare of SimTower when you started up the game – the subtle synth strings chord followed by two door knocks – better get your rejoicing shoes on, because it's back, albeit with a more elaborate title screen. The game itself doesn't have much music, however the sound effects are very distinguishable and extremely fun to listen to. You'll hear the chitter-chatter of the crowds as they move through your building and when the café is bustling, you'll hear dishes clanging and serene jukebox tunes. Pass by a busy pub and you'll hear what sounds like a television broadcast of a Japanese man's voice announcing a baseball game with the crowd cheering in the background. Probably the strangest thing about this game's sound is how the maids sound like they're bowling whenever they clean up rooms, and it's very distinct so it lets you in on their progress. All in all, the design of the sound is excellent and does a great job of depicting just how busy the contents of your tower can be, and as more and more people frequent your tower the sound effects will become more and more hectic.

As far as controlling the game goes, there isn't much I can cover. The menu system is more than competent and simple to navigate. You can choose up to three cursor speeds Mario Paint style, so if navigation becomes a chore you can kick up the speed of your movement. That's about it.

Although there is a limit to how high you can build your towers, the game could theoretically continue on forever. While the gameplay may not be deep enough to keep you hooked for years to come, The Tower SP has enough charm and depth to keep the player coming back for weeks, and even later to check up on his or her tower for a quick refresher. The open-ended experience means that a player who wants more from the game could very well start an entirely new tower from scratch and experiment with different ways of building with a countless number of different layouts. If you created a building that started off with offices for the first ten floors, you may want to start off with some condos for your next building - or perhaps create a building made entirely of toilets. This choice is up to the player, which is a running theme in all of Yoot Saito's creations, by his request. The only downside to this is due to the cartridge's limited storage capacity, only one save file may be held at a time.

Steady Beat - An ambitious tower of a game for ambitious towers of gamers.

The Tower SP is a nice little package for simulation fans who are always on the go. Despite the fact that more powerful hardware is currently available, Vivarium has proven that the GameBoy Advance is a perfectly capable system for this port. While gamers looking for an intrinsically complicated simulation experience may be turned away by the game's simplistic vibes, gamers looking for a more relax-paced experience may find The Tower SP to be the delightfully accessible handheld game they've always dreamed of.

Posted in: Reviews