SimEarth - a golden oldie

                      Reviewed by Sue

The game can be downloaded from
www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=984
The review first appeared in Red Herring magazine and has been
updated.

If you enjoyed being a mayor in SimCity and exercising your
organisational skills, and if you also got a kick out of playing
God in games like Populous, you can indulge yourself completely
with SimEarth by looking after a complete planet and all its
inhabitants.

When I first bought the package, it looked somewhat daunting with
a large, heavy box and a thick spiral-bound manual (plus a thinner
manual addendum for PC owners). The addendum was a slight problem
for me as my copy was in French and it was a while since I did my
O levels! Luckily the nice man at Ocean sent me a new copy in
English. However, despite initial impressions with all these pages
to read and inwardly digest, the simulation is surprisingly easy
to get into.

Unfortunately if you download the game from Underdogs, there's no
manual. I suppose no-one could be bothered to scan/type it in.

On loading, you're presented with a Help Window giving starting
instructions (help is readily available throughout the simulation)
and two maps, the Terrain Map and the Edit Map which gives greater
detail of the planet.  Selecting New Planet you can choose from
several different difficulty levels and eight planets, each of
which has its own problems. The best one to try first is Random
World as it can start from the effective birth of the planet (the
Geologic Time Scale) though you can jump up the time scale if you
want and pick Evolution, Civilised or Technology.

Starting in the Geologic Time Scale. you'll be presented with a
virgin planet where the oceans are slowly starting to appear. The
years tick by and life suddenly springs into being in the ocean
and soon the most primitive Prokaryotes are giving rise to more
complex Eukaryotes ...  evolution has begun.  Meanwhile tidal
waves, volcanos and other natural events are shaping the
continents.  Once the Cambrian Age starts, more and more new
species, both plant and animal, will start to appear and you can
either watch them dispassionately or take a hand in their
evolution by manipulating their environment in one of several
ways, changing factors such as the core heat of the planet, the
axial tilt, amount of rainfall, solar input or air-sea thermal
transfer. You can even affect the plants and animals themselves
more directly by changing their reproduction and mutation rate or
factors such as their thermal tolerance so that they can withstand
greater ranges of temperature.  Often changing several factors
together will be necessary.

There are more windows and graphs to tell you how your world is
progressing at every step. You can take air samples and that might
show that you need to increase or decrease one particular gas to
make the place more hospitable.  Another graph will show the ratio
of the different life forms on the planet. If you want you can
place particular life forms or habitats yourself and see if you
can get them to survive. In the early stages, because it's
tempting to give nature a bit too much of a helping hand, it's
very hard not to find mass extinctions occurring through your
interference but if you want to take charge completely, you can
cause one particular life form to become extinct by the merest
click of your mouse (oh, the power!). You can also vary the
appearance of the Map Window to check on the water and air
temperature, wind vectors and so forth.

Eventually life will appear on dry land and insects, dinosaurs and
birds will appear. Finally, mammals will evolve and from there
it's but a short step (in geological terms) until intelligent life
starts to take over.  Civilisations will rise and fall, from the
most primitive Stone Age Man to the Nanotech Age whose people may,
if you're lucky, leave the planet to terraform and colonise their
own. I got this to happen once and it gave me a real buzz!

On the easiest Experimental Level, you can tweak away to your
heart's content but on the harder levels, every move you make will
cost energy points eg 210 energy units to place a fish. The
SimEarthlings produce energy during their daily lives and you can
use it in whatever way you see fit.

This has been just a brief look at one of the most complex
packages I've ever used. But despite its complexity, it is very
user-friendly. The idea behind SimEarth is based around the Gaia
hypothesis developed by James Lovelock which essentially states
that many of a planet's systems are self-regulating. In its
extreme view, the Strong Gaia hypothesis, the planet is treated as
though it's alive. In fact there is a Gaia Window in SimEarth
which you can call up during the simulation and will show a face
on the planet giving you hints to improve its quality of life.  A
smiling face will tell you "I like animals" while a grimacing one
will state "this pollution is bad" and will complain bitterly
should you click the cursor on its eye (but you wouldn't do that,
would you?)

Theoretically any life on the planet, apart from the most
primitive Prokaryotes or Eukaryotes, can become intelligent. This
means you can actively foster the development of intelligent
reptiles, or whatever, if you want. I tried working on intelligent
dinosaurs but didn't have much success. Other scenarios let you
really take charge by terraforming Mars or Venus!















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