SimCity: Touchscreen megalomania on iPhone

By Jonathan Skillings on 19 December 2008, 10:07am

The iPhone's increasingly impressive games library just got a welcome double shot of nostalgia and megalomania -- you can now play the legendary SimCity on Apple's touchscreen handset.

Electronic Arts' seminal city-building game, priced at £5.99, is now available for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch devices through the App Store. Players can take advantage of the touchscreen technology to design and construct their vision of an urban landscape. And then smash it all down again with the catastrophe of their choice.

MG Siegler at VentureBeat, who's had a chance to play with the game for a while, waxed enthusiastic about the touchscreen qualities and more -- "SimCity is a very impressive game on the iPhone" -- but warned of some lingering bugs from the game's demo period:

"While some of those issues have been fixed -- the game runs fairly snappy now, when loaded -- I'm experiencing the game crashing and a slowdown in actions like zooming. From the early reviews I'm seeing on SimCity's App Store page, I'm not alone in experiencing this.

"And unfortunately, loading even the more bare-bones previously saved city takes a long time (I'm talking minutes). Maybe for some, that will just add to the nostalgic experience -- I remember this was an issue on my old PC back in the day as well. For others, it'll be annoying."