The Tower SP: Cleaning Toilets Has Never Been More Fun

The other week I found many Gameboy Advance games on sale at Toys R Us for just under $10. That being a great price for a new Gameboy Advance game, I decided to pick it up. After all, I like sim games, though I was a little wary given what they stripped out of other Sim GBA titles like SimCity 2000.

Gameplay

The Tower SP is a port of Sim Tower to the Gameboy Advance. The idea is you start with a linear plot of land and extend it upwards. You're measured by how many people you can cram into your building by placing offices, condos, and hotel rooms. Attracting people is accomplished through managing the stress of your tenants and visitors. You reduce stress by allowing quick and convenient access to creature comforts like shops, restaurants, saunas, and cinemas, while allowing them a convenient way to get in and out of the building. You have to manage the traffic flow for the elevators. If people are waiting too long for them, they'll stress levels will rise, however building stairs will help ease congestion by providing alternate means of ascending through the building. Tenants demands for medical facilities, parking, and subway access will also prove to ease stress and create more visitors through word of mouth. You also have to keep certain residents partitioned from each other to reduce stress as well. Condo residents don't like the noise of offices, shops or stores, office tenants also don't like the noise generated from shops and restaurants.

The budget is one of the most important aspects of The Tower SP. You get weekly rent from offices, nightly rent from hotel guests, restaurants, and shops, and a one time payment from condo residents. You are billed for maintenance charges (elevators, bathrooms, etc.) as well as employees to patrol and clean your building for you. You can adjust the prices of certain revenue generating units as well as the size of your cleaning and night watchman staff to optimize revenue streams, but that also affects the stress of your tenants as well as your staff's ability to get their job done. You can do some tasks on your own too. You can manually clean the bathrooms by mashing the A button. The same goes for attracting people to a restaurant in your building. Overall, if you partition your building logically, and spend your profits to minimize stress first and expand the building second, you'll always have a healthy revenue stream. Then you can sit back and watch the cash stream in.

There are certain events, that can cause headaches too. If not patrolled every night, tenants can get burgled and cause a commotion in the building. Similarly if your cleaning staff doesn't clean all the rooms, they will become invested with roaches. While there are several steps to recover the faith of your tenants here, if you let the problem linger too long then you'll have to break out the eviction hammer just to get them to shut up, and costing you lots of money in the process. Also if you have tenants who like using electricity, it can cause brownouts. Keeping a mindful eye on power usage really helps to prevent this from happening. These three incidents are easily preventable and rarely come into play. However fires aren't. Like the disasters in SimCity, fires happen randomly and can damage units in your building, though they're only a minor annoyance most of the time.

Once you figure out the mechanics of the game, the lack of depth becomes apparent. For instance, you can build condos, but they don't generate constant rent. Instead they act more as a loan. What's useless about them is that for the cost of building and maintaining them, it just isn't worth it. You're better off building offices and later hotel rooms which rake in rent every week and just wait it out. I also found certain features useless too. For instance, unit pricing for condos and offices is pointless. I never touched the unit pricing at all because I don't construct condos and it's easy to keep stress levels low for offices at the second highest rent setting. Anything higher and you'll be doing damage to your reputation, and thus keeping people away. Also, there's no need to manage the power consumption of your building. While brownouts are possible, they are easily avoidable to the point where you almost have to cause them on purpose. With the lack of diverse gameplay dynamics, The Tower SP really becomes more robotic than fun.

Overall the gameplay is solid. It's fun to manage the construction and layout of a building, but it clearly doesn't have as many gameplay dynamics as a game like SimCity 2000. It also plays itself for a vast majority of the time because it's so easy to make a profit. The only challenge comes from the limited space you have to erect your building. Achieving tower status really takes some delicate planning, but it's not too hard if you have enough cash squirreled away. It just doesn't have the trade offs you'd expect from a good Sim game. Still, it is a pretty faithful port which is solid for the most part, just not very deep.


Controls

The controls are rather basic, but they get the job done. The right trigger opens up the unit menu for adding new units to your building. If you press it again you can see a breakdown of your building's units in terms of stress, pricing, and power consumption. The select button opens up your finances, which usually in the black depending on how logically you constructed your building. The start button opens up a menu allowing you to save your game. The A button places items, selects them, and performs operations. The B button cancels operations, or switches to a descriptive cursor. The dpad moves the mouse pointer and is pretty responsive. My only issue is that the pointer is rather sticky with certain parts of the building. This is a problem when a staircase overlaps bathroom you want to clean. The trick is finding a spot where the pointer won't be drawn to the staircase. Otherwise the controls are good and make for a decent interface.


Graphics

The graphics aren't all that spectacular. While I can understand the graphical limitations of the Gameboy Advance, I also know that it's capable of producing a better color scheme. People are represented by silhouettes and you can identify their demographic most of the time. The building units themselves also have some awfully bland colors not improved upon since the original Sim Tower PC game. Still, the developers did do a good job of representing the different units while making everything distinguishable and readable. Animations aren't all that good. People can sometimes "jump" all over the place, while elevators seem to travel at different speeds. It's actually rather amusing to see an elevator car full of people rush down the shaft at warp speed, but sadly it isn't realistic and can throw off the gameplay at times.


Sound

The sound is by far the most disappointing aspect of The Tower SP. There's no musical track that churns along while you're playing. This is something that really kept me going during the slow times in games like SimCity 2000. I know it's not too commonplace to see it in these games, but I just felt it needed a catchy tune. The sound effects are also sub par. Most of them signify specific events in the game like the opening of the business day, ambient telephones ringing in the office, and the movement of the elevator. But then there are others which I can't even tell what they are or what they mean. In the end, when your building gets sufficiently large, it just becomes a hodgepodge of random sound effects. If you want to listen to something while playing this game make sure to bring along a MP3 player.


Replay

Sadly, this Sim game doesn't have much lasting value. The limited depth really hurts the replay value to the point where it's a one and done type of game. The strategies are all laid out for you to the point where unit placement is almost a forgone conclusion. There's no harder difficulty level, and you really can't create disasters at the press of a button just to mix things up like in other Sim games.

To say the least, there isn't much incentive to replay this game once you've achieved tower status. Yes there are rewards to explore for achieving that status, but it doesn't do much to extend the game's life. There really is one way to build a tower and too much variation from that will find you up to your eyeballs in debt trying to redesign the building. If the game had more depth, I think more variation would be possible.

It's not that The Tower SP is a bad game, it just is a limited port of a game in need of more depth to begin with. Simply managing the stress of your tenants while catering to their every whims and desires doesn't translate to a very deep game. There isn't much to the game other than creating the optimal building and waiting to see what bounties roll in. What's worse is that these bounties aren't as diverse and plentiful as other Sim games anyway. I would recommend this game more for a long but not too long plane or car ride. The longest I can imagine someone playing this game is 8 hours.