Sim Park was one of the Sim Kids series of games put out by Maxis in the later part of the 1990s in order to get more schools to buy their video games, what with the push by big wigs Senator Joe Leiberman and Tipper Gore against violence in video games, and the Columbine incident in Colorado. The push was so that the video game industry could survive, touting the supreme creations of Will Wright's creative team at Maxis for all the work they'd done to improve the industry as a whole.
Sim Park was one of the Sim Kids series of games put out by Maxis in the later part of the 1990s in order to get more schools to buy their video games, what with the push by big wigs Senator Joe Leiberman and Tipper Gore against violence in video games, and the Columbine incident in Colorado. The push was so that the video game industry could survive, touting the supreme creations of Will Wright's creative team at Maxis for all the work they'd done to improve the industry as a whole.
I have had this game on one computer or another that I have owned continuously since its release many years ago, and it remains one of my favourites to this day.
In this game, you take on the role of a park ranger, (I always chose the name "Ranger Rick" after my beloved raccoon magazine hero of the 1980s) who takes on the job of landscaping the park with trees, shrubs, and grasses, populating it with reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, as well as building amenities ranging from camp sites to gazebos and bathrooms for your human visitors. After building all these wonderful park amenities, you were expected to identify all the plants and animals in the park using the "indent-species" option under the computer selection tool. This was one more way the guys at maxis helped to add replay and educational value to the game, using this and the bird song mini-games to build student's (and adult's in my case) knowledge of the natural world with easily broken down phenotypes such as "is it a snake, or does it have legs?" to "does it have a round body or a long body" as an option when identifying reptiles such as the alligator in this example.
The game has its maintenance points like any other simulator game, using various "disasters" to little effect other than annoying the player (who had wisely saved the game before wrecking up the place) but not creating any real scenarios like in almost all other simulator games up to this point. Kudzu was by far the most annoying, as it destroyed everything and left nothing in its place but a nasty message from the programmers, whereas the fire was the most entertaining, allowing you to fry all those tasty crazy critters, making critter fritters.
I only had one real problem with the game, and that was the annoying little frog Rizzo, who would offer you what he thought of as "help" at various points in the game, often popping up right as you were about to do something important, and throwing you right off. Unfortunately you couldn’t turn him off once you started the game, thus being a real bother later on. All in all though, I give Sim Park a 4 out of 5 maple leaves, for its brilliant solution to the edutainment crisis. Download Sim Safari too if you liked this game and want more of a challenge out of your kid's series.
