June 23, 2008 - Electronic Arts and Hudson Soft are cooking up a new edition of SimCity, designed specifically for the Wii and DS. We got a look at the Wii version at EA's pre-E3 event and were impressed with the ways it uses the Wii remote to facilitate city building. The core SimCity gameplay is here, but you haven't controlled it this way on a console before.
One of the most obvious uses of the remote is the ability to free-draw roads. Surprisingly, this is the first time in SimCity's history that players can create curved roadways. Using the remote as a pointer, roads can be drawn in any shape, picture, or word the player wishes.
The metropolitan areas of SimCity are always divided into commercial, residential, and industrial zones. Setting these zones is easier than ever as players click an area they want to serve as the zone's center and pull back the remote to enlarge a perfect sphere to their liking. Each zone needs at least one power plant to keep the lights on. Placing a plant somewhere inside a zone is all that is required to provide power. However, you can build a power plant outside of a zone and still run electricity to it with power lines. You might want to do this if you build a fusion reactor, as they're less stable than normal power plants and if a meltdown occurs you don't want it happening in a heavily populated area.
Or maybe you do. Part of the fun of SimCity has always been destroying what you build, and Creator provides several new disasters to play around with. Most of these have been designed to use waggle controls. Tornados can be summoned by "swirling" the remote. Meteors are called by making sweeping downward motions. A giant hammer can be used to smash buildings to bits. A giant ball utilizes tilt controls. There are also UFOs, giant robots, and mysterious ghost hands that slap down skyscrapers. The latter is very weird, but Hudson is a Japanese developer, of course, and known to walk on the wacky side.
Players can customize the look of their city with 32 different "hero" buildings. Each of these structures is an example of different architecture, and placing one will result in the surrounding area adapting to this visual style. Examples include ancient Japanese architecture, candy land, or futuristic skyscrapers.
Advisors are on hand to help with the management of your city. Fans of last summer's Wii Sims game MySims will recognize that title's characters, appearing here as advisors. They can merely offer advice, or they can be tasked with managing whole areas of town while you focus your attention elsewhere.
The game will congratulate you for reaching population milestones at 10,000 people, 50,000, and so on. Eventually you'll unlock aircraft you can use to fly around and get a closer look at your town. There are also flight missions that provide a more structured airborne experience.
For the most part the game has a clean, cartoonish look. Destroying buildings looks a little ghetto, though. The structures simply disappear without any animation. Representatives for the game assured us it's about all the Wii can handle.
SimCity Creator looks like it will offer the classic city building experience updated for motion controls. Casual mayors can fiddle with some light construction, but those that want to delve deeper can get their hands dirty and utilize data maps for more complicated urban planning.
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I have always loved simcity games. This is looking to be a must buy.
![[Prototype]](https://www.vgchartz.com/games/boxart/2846586AmericaFrontccc.jpg)
