This week on Old Games That Don’t Suck Thursday, it’s SimTower.  And man it’s a funky game.

So imagine a vertical game of Sim City.  Instead of allocating services like roads you supplement elevators.  Instead of zoning you build offices and condos and instead of parks you build movie theatres.  This is SimTower.

I love SimTower for one reason: Elevators.  Elevators were the coolest concept in the entire game. You build different size elevators to take you to different levels and areas.  Your high traffic areas require more elevators or elevator shafts, your slower building areas require less.  If you can’t balance your elevators you can see your patrons getting angry while they wait, which will eventually drive down the happiness of the building.  The trick here is building larger elevators to supplement the main floors, and sending smaller elevators away from the main floors so it forces people to take a couple elevators.  Then you can program your elevators just to go upwards or downwards to influence the direction and pattern of the elevator cars.  That alone deserves it’s own game.

And one day, I want to revisit elevatoring.  I Love Traffic channels some of the energy of sorting and prioritizing but I really want to make an elevator game one day.

So anyway, yes, SimTower.  It’s a great game if you play it solely for elevator organization.  The game itself cannot beat a good SimCity 2000 but for an older Win95/Mac game it does the job.