BEING a mayor isn't, as is widely held, all about dressing up in silly frocks and leading a procession once a year. Well, maybe a bit of it is, but there are some pretty tough decisions to be made too, like what areas of natural beauty to destroy and industrialise, how high to set the rates, building roads to combat traffic congestion and building expensive residential areas for incredible rich people - like mayors - to live in.

Sim City will terraform a suitable landscape for you and set the clock back to the year 1900. How the New Town development proceeds from here is up to you.
Remember, the social make-up of the town depends on these early stages - one wrong plan and it could be Milton Keynes for thousands of innocents. You are in a position of great social responsibility.

The first thing to do is build a power station - man cannot live by candle alone. Along with this decision comes your first quandary - coal or nuclear?
A coal power station is considerably cheaper, but causes more environmental damage, and pollution is one of the factors that affects population growth. Nuclear, while more expensive, is a lot cleaner unless, of course, you have a meltdown.
Already you are making decisions which will effect the structure of the city to come. In fact, the early decisions are far more important than those taken later on.

Growth of the city will critically depend on how high you set the tax rate and how much valuable land you cultivate for the populace. The initial considerations are for power, transport and zoning regions for industry, commerce and residents.

It is important to note that you do not actually build on any of the zoned regions, your population does. If you zone a residential region in the middle of an industrial wasteland, don't expect many people to go and live there.
The challenge therefore is not merely to provide a certain amount of accommodation for each of the city's functions but to use a piece of land for the purpose for which it is most suited.
Furthermore, each zoning decision you take will effect the suitability of neighbouring property for a particular task, due to reasons of traffic, pollution nd land value. As the city grows, so will other factors, like pollution, crime and traffic density.

Police stations are a good idea, and if you are lanning for a Pudding Lane then a few fire departments might go down well too. Of course, all this costs money, and the only place to get it is via the annual rates demand. It's a good thing that you don't have to get re-elected.

Just when you think you have it all worked out the trade figures suffer a slight blip, commerce slumps, the taxes must go up and before you know it the last of the fleeing population have you hanging upside-down in your lovingly sculptured town square.

Presentation doesn't mean much in a game like this, but great care has been taken to make your metropolis look as brilliant as it was designed.

Sim City follows the simple philosophy of a game called Kingdom, which was widely popular in the days when programming meant wearing a white coat and flicking switches - define a few simple rules that describe a reality and then explore the mathematics. This it does excellently.

Who wants t be a city major? I do. Just imagine being in the hot seat in San Francisco after the 1908 earthquake: could you cope? Or how about controlling Tokyo in '57 when Godzilla has just been spotted heading your way?

Sim City is just that: a simulation of a city. Leaving the pre-set scenarios aside for the moment, the idea of the game is to build a city from scratch and keep the thing ticking over using the limited funds available.

Every city in the game has three basic 'blocks': Residential, Commercial and Industrial. A successful city will have the right balance of all three blocks: no point having loads of shops and banks if the populace has no jobs or homes! But it's not necessarily as easy as all that.

At the start of the game, you're given a lump sum of money - the exact amount depending on the skill level - and you then have to take several things into consideration before splashing the loot about. For example, the residential zones will need to be far enough away from the industrial zones to encourage people to come and live in them, yet transport routes between everything have to be good (roads and railways can be built). There will have to be enough jobs to attract people to your town and enough commercial zones for them to spend their wages in... And so it goes on.

Once you've set the town up, complete with power stations and police and fire departments, the major headache is keeping people there to nail for their taxes: tax money being the only other source of capital, needed to maintain and expand the town. Set the tax rate too low one year (the game runs in years which take about five minutes of real time) and you'll attract lots of residents but you will generate very little revenue.

And once you start losing money, the problems start to occur. The come rate may be soaring, but if you just can't afford another police station people leave and the community eventually starts falling apart.

It's all a question of balance: juggling the economy, listening to people's needs (an evaluation chart can be called up at any time to see what percentage of the population think you're doing a good job, and see what their biggest gripes are) and trying to expand until your small village turns into a Megapolis of a quarter of a million citizens.

If building and running your own city seems too much hard work then you can always try jumping into a ready-built one, as mentioned earlier. The scenarios are a harder game in many ways, as you are always set specific tasks: restore an earthquake-devastated town to its former glory in something like 30 years.

Real masochists, though, will start a town from scratch and build it up until it's doing very nicely thank you, and then invoke a disaster of their own, such as a flood or a major city fire. Whatever you choose, you're the mayor and it's the population you answer to.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND

The sound effects are fine but that's all they are. The graphics are basic but they do their job well enough. Simple looking stuff.

JUDGEMENT

It's the compulsive gameplay that really makes it. It has that certain something that makes you want to keep going, for hours at a stretch: just one game can last you for weeks. It has much more general appeal than something like a football management game, but it has the same 'once you're into it you can't get out of it' character. Terrific stuff.

To most of CU's readership the name Sim City means nothing. To a few it represents one of the most amazing pieces of software yet to appear. It not only dazzled people at the massive Consumer Electronic Show in America, it also managed a staggering sixteen page write up in Japan's biggest computer mag, Login. Unfortunately, in its original state, Sim City would only run on a one Meg Amiga and was totally unavailable in this country.

At last somebody decided that it might just be a good idea to release it in the UK. So with a couple of minor changes enabling it to run on unexpanded machines, here it is.

Sim City gives you a chance to go one step further than the deity you played in Populous - it lets you become a politician. You're given a nice plot of land, twenty thousand bucks and freedom to do what ever you want. I christened my piece of wasteland Happy Valley II (in memory of Happy Valley which went under in an earth quake on my imported version).

The first thing to do is to get a population. I established a nice residential area and linked it to the power grid. Following that I linked industry to the power grid. Creating a motorway proved no problem and I soon had a growing economy. As with any good city it needed department stores; the addition of some commercial zones was welcomed by the Happy Vallien's. And so my first year in office came to a close.

The economy was only running slightly in the red, but the polls showed that crime was an increasing problem. To combat this I had a police station built, and upped the taxes to 9% to help fund it.
Five years later and Happy Valley II had a population of 20,000, a sea port and a footy stadium. Even with a railway, public opinion showed my popularity dwindling in the face of congested road ways. I embarked on building my version of the M25 Orbital. Like most great motorways it ran out of money half way through construction. Still the effort paid off and the people went back to moaning about pollution and the taxes.

Twenty years after that and I have a continually expanding city, a healthy economy, lots of lovely happy people, and most of the industry has moved out to the countryside. However...
It wasn't my fault the nuclear reactor suffered a meltdown. Only half the city was rendered unsalvageable; I thought nuclear power was supposed to be safe and clean. With ten thousand people and millions of dollars worth of real estate written off, it looks like it's time for Happy Valley III.

If you don't really want to take the risk of losing your city in a major disaster you can practise reclamation on one of a pre-built town. They give you a set amount of time to clear up flooding, fires and disasters - the works.

This is an excellent game which has already written itself in the pages of computer history. It's already been accepted as an essential study tool for students of architecture and urban studies in certain US universities. But don't assume that means Sim City is an egg head's game. It's fun, addictive, original and amazing.

Is your town as dull and boring as Ludlow? Or is it as polluted and overcrowded as London? What idiot plans these nightmares?

If you think you can do better, Sim City offers the opportunity of being Mayor. Starting off on easy level you have got $10,000 to set up your town. Your overhead view of a section of a 100 square miles landscape can be scrolled about by mouse. Once you have chosen where to site your city you can click on icons on the right to build and zone.

Zoning is one of the most important planning devices. It basically means cities are split into residential, commercial and industrial zones. This prevents houses being built on the same sites as factories. In the game you can't actually build homes, factories or shops, just establish zones where other people can build them, if they want. To encourage people to do this you must provide power by building a power station, either coal - which pollutes - or nuclear - more powerful and cleaner, but has a slight risk of nuclear meltdown!

To link zones to the station you have to build powerlines. Use the mouse to place sections individually, or hold down the left button to draw your connections with them. You must also build a transport network with roads (cheap to build and maintain) and rail (no traffic jams, but expensive). As your city expands crime will increase, as will the risk of fires, requiring police and fire stations. If you are near water you might want to build a seaport to increase industrial growth, or you could even cough up for an airport to improve commercial growth.

Both building and zoning cost money which must be raised by taxes once your initial money runs out. Taxe rates from 0% to 7% encourage people to move into your city, but don't raise that much money. Tax rates above 9% encourage people to leave the city. Besides funding new activities, you must also fund fire and police stations ($100 per station per year) and roads ($1 per section of road per year). You don't have to give these services what they ask for, but if you don't services deteriorate.

High tax rates are not the only things to cause residents to leave however: high crime rates, pollution (caused by too much industry packed together), traffic jams and so on, are bad for city growth. Thankfully maps and charts can be called up to show all these factors with invaluable detail and clarity.

There are 21 types of commercial areas, 20 residential, and 9 industrial, ranging from slums to top class, fast growing areas. If you manage to keep your city growing despite pollution and so on, you might still be defeated by such disasters as earthquakes, fires, flooding, plane crashes, tornados and even rampaging monsters! These occur at random, coming more frequently on higher skill levels. Sadists can choose to inflict them on their cities if they want.

There are also eight scenarios which can be loaded from disk. These range from Dullsville (transform a boring town into a megalopolis) to Rio De Janeiro (rebuild a massive city recovering from a flood). Scenarios have tight time limits to add to the excitement.

Why? Quite a poignant question, that, I put it to Bristol City Council after every roundabout in the city was replaced overnight by a set of traffic lights. It also begged to be asked when blue Smarties appeared, consigning years of tradition to the dustbin for no obvious reason. And every time they change the Blue Peter signature tune, 'why?' is the word that forms on the lips of the nation.

And I'm afraid that, despite employing my powers of investigative journalism to their full, the reasoning behind these three pieces of software remains a mystery. Let's look at the Architecture disks first. They each offer three alternative sets of architecture. There's 21st Century USA, 22nd Century Europe and Moon Base on the first disk, and Ancient Asia, Medieval Times and Wild West on the second. They sound like fun. But all they actually DO is change the graphics your copy of Sim City uses to display cities (And only after endless pratting about with installation programs and blank disks).

Stadiums turn into rodeos or low-gravity complexes, airports turn into castles or space ports, and so on. An interesting exercise, but a pointless and slightly sad one. It's a bit like buying a plastic spoiler and some fog lamps for your Ford Escort 1.3 Popular in the hope that they'll make it go faster.

And what of the Terrain Editor? Isn't Sim City already an 'editor'? Surely, that's the whole point? Well, yes. So what the Terrain Editor does is let you handle the process that takes place while Sim City is displaying the 'Terraforming' message. That is, designing the layout of the land, sea and trees that your city will be built on. So you could, if you like, reproduce your favourite piece of coastline (those fjords around Norway, perhaps). You could write your name in trees. And, er, that's it.

At £7.99 for all three, die-hard Sim City fans might conceivably be tempted,especially for the collection of demo cities supplied on the Editor disk. But a tenner each? Nope, it seems that unless you've exhausted Halford's selection of Escort add-ons, or you make a bit of a gaffe and assume you're holding a copy of Sim City itself (which could easily be done - the packaging is very deceptive), you'd have to be stark, staring bonkers to buy any of those.

Things You Didn't Already Know About Sim City, Number One. Er, it's an anagram of Tim Yics. Let's forget about Numbers 2-100, shall we? The fact is, EVERYBODY knows about Sim City. Even if you hadn't heard of it previously, it was in the All-Time Top One Hundred back on page 53, so you have now. The only further info you need from this review is that Sim City Deluxe includes the original game plus the Terrain Editor disk and the Architecture 1 set which were both reviewed back in issue 16, and which enabled you to alter the graphical style of the game or change the layout of the ground where you build your city. So let's talk about something else. Let's talk about fizzy drinks.

Caffeine-Free Diet Coke - just what is the bloody point? There are two things you drink cola for, right? One is energy and a quick sugar boost, so taking the sugar out is obviously a stupid idea. The other is a caffeine fix when it's a hot summer's day or you don't want to drink anything as revolting as coffee in the first place, so why take the caffeine out?

Caffeine-free diet cola tastes like someone took a mouthful of muddy river water with syrup in it, swilled it around their mouth and spat it back into a tin, so there can't be any aesthetic reason for drinking it either. So why does it exist? What does it tell us about our society? I'll tell you what it tells us - it tells us that we're a bunch of pathetic losers so utterly suckered by aspirational advertising ("Drink this and you needn't be a sad empty nobody any longer! You too can have a gleaming, shiny smile like these dreamy all-American teens - because all your real teeth will have fallen out and you'll have a set of lovely porcelain ones") that we'll even drink something with all its Coke-type properties take out, as long as it's still called 'Coke'.

I mean, the last bastion of cola-boy hipness is swigging the dark enigmatic black stuff out of that bottle, so what have they done now? Clear cola Jesus. Yeah, guzzling a can of Tab's really doing to make the girls think you're James Dean. What's the matter with people? Why can't they do ANYTHING properly? And that, in the most ludicrously tangential way yet, brings me back to Sim City Deluxe.

Sim City is now, what, four years old? Maybe more. Artistically it looks, as you might expect, a little shabby. The god sim genre it spawned has thrown up countless imitations, most recently lovely-looking, compelling epics like A-Train. If you were going to re-release Sim City today at the same price as the competition, you'd really want to pull out all the stops to give it a chance in a tough market, wouldn't you?

I reckon, for a start, you'd want to include every single data disk supplement that anybody'd ever written for it. So bundling the £30 Sim City Deluxe with the novel-but--next-to-useless Terrain Editor and JUST ONE of the two extra Architecture disks must surely be one of the most pathetic example of penny-pinching stinginess even this mean-minded industry's ever seen. (Don't worry, though - there's a special offer in the box allowing you to buy Architecture 2 at a reduced price! Gee, thanks, Infogrames!).

But hey, isn't the world just like that? Don't be without Sim City, but search the bargain bins of your local software shops for a year before you buy this particular version. Death to corporate accountants.

Sim City is definitely a game that needs no introduction. After selling over a million and a half units around the world, it paved the way for products like Sim Earth, Sim Ant and Sim Life, and now has come full circle with Sim City Deluxe, everything you could ever need to be Mayor.

The basic premise of Sim City is that you act as a sort of God/town planner/mayor of a small city. On the face of it this seems to be a completely boring idea, but it turns out to be one of the most riveting Amiga games.

Inside the glamorous black and gold box are three packages, which link together to create a complete system. There is the original Sim City of course, where you do all the actual town planning and management - the heart of the game itself. Alongside that are the previously released Sim City Terrain Editor and Architekture 1.

The released Terrain Editor, not surprisingly, allows you to alter terrain to your liking, so you can place your town on a rock plateau, or under 30 feet of water, which is not advisable.

Architekture 1, on the other hand, is a set of three new scenarios for you to work with, all based in the far future (Future Europe, Future USA and a Moon Colony), and add stacks more challenge to a product that will already keep you up nights and indoors at weekends.

Sim City is now four years old, and thankfully it is still every bit as enjoyable as it always was. To say it is a classic would be like saying Tetris is a good puzzle game. If you do not have Sim City already, then there is no better way to get hold of it.