Simcity 64

Tonight I came across gameplay video on Youtube of Simcity 64 for Nintendo's N64 add-on... the 64DD.
The 64DD was only released through limited channels (you couldn't just walk into a retailer and buy one off the shelf) in Japan towards the end of 1999. Years in development- the add-on was considered in the gaming community to be Nintendo's 'answer' to the now-standard optical disc (CD or DVD) media used by consoles at the time- and today. The system worked much like an IoMega ZIP Drive in that the games were stored on high-capacity megnetic disks (64MB, conveniently enough)- still several times smaller than a CD's capacity, but more than most N64 cartridge titles at the time.
64DD was long believed to be vaporware- and it's release appeared almost more like a PR ploy by the company, who took considerable heat from developers and gamers alike for continuing to adopt the silicon chip cartridge format (which, despite being considerably faster than optical drives in the retrieval of data- held much less data, to the tune of several times less, than a CD)- over the CD-ROM drives found in the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn consoles. Nintendo also had a history of vaporware consoles- notably the release of a CD-ROM add-on for the Super NES- which likely influenced their decision to release the 64DD to thwart the image of a company with yet another failed add-on device.

All that aside, the system was actually released, and had a total of 9 titles published for the platform. One of them, was Simcity 64. After seeing the Youtube video, posted below, I was pretty blown away. No, the graphics aren't amazing- especially by today's standards, but this is Simcity at a higher eschelon than usual, I believe. I've been a Simcity fan since the days of DOS- so I know when I see something I like... and I really like the look of Simcity 64. It would have been interesting to play- for sure. I certainly am more intreagued with this than I am the recent installations of the series on Nintendo DS (I'm not holding out any hope for Simcity DS 2).
I certainly hope Nintendo opts to give the rest of the world a taste of what could have been by releasing 64DD titles on the Wii Virtual Console. We've already seen Sin and Punishment hit North American shores for the first time ever on the VC- so why not the 64DD?
Ah- one can dream at least...

Simcity 64 First launch and Gameplay 64DD

Comments

[j2sw]

I miss the SimCity franchise. I could care less about talking to the citizens. I just want to build stuff!

[Natasha]

Nice games
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