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Let me tell you a story...
During the winter of 2007, I got assigned what was perhaps the lamest homework in history: a study on foreign media.
To fulfill the requirements of the stupid assignment, we had to haul ass to town and get ourselves a copy of a foreign newspaper of choice (I picked "Le Monde" because I thought it translated to "Lemon" — and you can quantify the amount of fucks I gave about the whole thing based on that alone).
Because my mom gave even less of a damn about it - as long as I passed, that is -, she just pressed a wad of cash into my hand and sent me on my way, not even caring that she had given me enough to buy a whole stack of the suckers.
Normally, money would be kept very tightly controlled, and I would have to account for every cent spent because mom would send my sister along with me to make sure I didn't engage in what she loved to call "reckless spending".
But "The Narc" (which is what I called my sister) wasn't available that particular afternoon due to some previous engagement she couldn't (or, more likely, wouldn't) get out of.
I was already filling my head with chocolate-y dreams and thoughts of steaming cups of coffee when I saw an even greater sight right there: a stack of fossilized gaming magazines from the mid-90s that were intensely bent, sun-damaged, and had clearly, painfully gone through countless hands before landing to the right of those stupid foreign papers.
Because I was deeply in love with the whole "retro gaming" thing, I was already thinking about photographing the yellowed pages with my phone's camera and uploading them for my then-forum mates to see. It was going to be great!
But that was short-lived because those magazines were USED in the most literal sense of the word — most pages were scribbled on, some had stains (the identity of which I didn't wish to know), and some had been torn apart entirely. There was no way I was going to upload such a fiasco... I'd look like a bitch!
But what had really stopped me was - ironically enough - one of the few surviving features in that hapless stack: a review of SimTown, a game I knew nothing about at the time.
To properly understand how mind-blowing this was for me, you gotta know that I was a Maxis GROUPIE — I'd play any of their games I could get my hands on, even if I couldn't even understand them (language barriers were very much a thing for me), and SimCity 2000 had proven to be the focus of my incredible obsession, right to the point where I'd debate my teachers on the concept of taxes as they were presented by the game.
I was a massive loser.
But SimTown was nowhere to be found on the internet, and that annoyed me. Every other Maxis game was common currency in the Abandonware world, but not this one... why?
Regardless, I think I wouldn't have been able to run it even back then because, unlike every other Maxis game I had, this one was made for Windows, something my XP machine deeply resented.
I had started this whole thread expecting it to be wistful — I had wanted to lament not playing this one game that had seemed so incredibly significant to me...
... But guess what? While I was busy at work grabbing screenshots to make it less drab, I found out that it was also released on Super Famicom.
Seizures.
As of the time of writing, I haven't even fired it up once... but I'm as excited as I was back then. It's not often that you get to knock a game off your list like that, and this one couldn't have come at a better time.
Woooooo!
During the winter of 2007, I got assigned what was perhaps the lamest homework in history: a study on foreign media.
To fulfill the requirements of the stupid assignment, we had to haul ass to town and get ourselves a copy of a foreign newspaper of choice (I picked "Le Monde" because I thought it translated to "Lemon" — and you can quantify the amount of fucks I gave about the whole thing based on that alone).
Because my mom gave even less of a damn about it - as long as I passed, that is -, she just pressed a wad of cash into my hand and sent me on my way, not even caring that she had given me enough to buy a whole stack of the suckers.
Normally, money would be kept very tightly controlled, and I would have to account for every cent spent because mom would send my sister along with me to make sure I didn't engage in what she loved to call "reckless spending".
But "The Narc" (which is what I called my sister) wasn't available that particular afternoon due to some previous engagement she couldn't (or, more likely, wouldn't) get out of.
I was already filling my head with chocolate-y dreams and thoughts of steaming cups of coffee when I saw an even greater sight right there: a stack of fossilized gaming magazines from the mid-90s that were intensely bent, sun-damaged, and had clearly, painfully gone through countless hands before landing to the right of those stupid foreign papers.
Because I was deeply in love with the whole "retro gaming" thing, I was already thinking about photographing the yellowed pages with my phone's camera and uploading them for my then-forum mates to see. It was going to be great!
But that was short-lived because those magazines were USED in the most literal sense of the word — most pages were scribbled on, some had stains (the identity of which I didn't wish to know), and some had been torn apart entirely. There was no way I was going to upload such a fiasco... I'd look like a bitch!
But what had really stopped me was - ironically enough - one of the few surviving features in that hapless stack: a review of SimTown, a game I knew nothing about at the time.
To properly understand how mind-blowing this was for me, you gotta know that I was a Maxis GROUPIE — I'd play any of their games I could get my hands on, even if I couldn't even understand them (language barriers were very much a thing for me), and SimCity 2000 had proven to be the focus of my incredible obsession, right to the point where I'd debate my teachers on the concept of taxes as they were presented by the game.
I was a massive loser.
But SimTown was nowhere to be found on the internet, and that annoyed me. Every other Maxis game was common currency in the Abandonware world, but not this one... why?
Regardless, I think I wouldn't have been able to run it even back then because, unlike every other Maxis game I had, this one was made for Windows, something my XP machine deeply resented.
I had started this whole thread expecting it to be wistful — I had wanted to lament not playing this one game that had seemed so incredibly significant to me...
... But guess what? While I was busy at work grabbing screenshots to make it less drab, I found out that it was also released on Super Famicom.
Seizures.
As of the time of writing, I haven't even fired it up once... but I'm as excited as I was back then. It's not often that you get to knock a game off your list like that, and this one couldn't have come at a better time.
Woooooo!
