Comment Pharaoh & Cleopatra (Score 2, Interesting) 179
Since SimCity 4 seems to be covered already, I'll throw in my 2-cents for one of my favorite games of all time. Pharaoh (and it's expansion, Cleopatra) is a very challenging, educational and fun game from the city building series created by Impressions and published by Sierra. There is some violence since the game tries to combine RTS games with Sim games, but the majority of game play is city building. (It's pretty hard to get away from violence 100% in historical games.) I'm not sure if this game was published for the Mac OS, but its predecessor in the series (Cesar) is defiantly available for Mac 9 and is a decent substitute. The later games in the series (Zeus, Poseidon, and Emperor) have more of a cartoon look and feel, making them less historically interesting and changes in the game rules make them less challenging.
As for defending the Sims, I recently attended a lecture on story telling through video games at Stanford University. One of the professors there was extolling the virtues of the Sims as a teaching tool. Apparently one of the term projects for the freshman humanities class at Stanford is to create a Shakespeare play using the Sims. Will Wright (the creator of the Sims and Sim City) was another one of the lecturers there. He said his philosophy behind creating games is to create the environment for player to create their own stories. As I see it, that is what he has done, thus creating games that are not inherently anything. The Sims is a means of letting a user tell a story and is no more risque than MS Word. It is important to remember that even though characters are allowed to sleep in the same bed, no characters in the Sims are allowed to engage in sexual activities. I feel the real danger for children from the Sims comes from it's online version, since all online communities have their share of predators. Sticking to the off-line version may also further your case. That's my opinion at least. Hope this helps.
-j
As for defending the Sims, I recently attended a lecture on story telling through video games at Stanford University. One of the professors there was extolling the virtues of the Sims as a teaching tool. Apparently one of the term projects for the freshman humanities class at Stanford is to create a Shakespeare play using the Sims. Will Wright (the creator of the Sims and Sim City) was another one of the lecturers there. He said his philosophy behind creating games is to create the environment for player to create their own stories. As I see it, that is what he has done, thus creating games that are not inherently anything. The Sims is a means of letting a user tell a story and is no more risque than MS Word. It is important to remember that even though characters are allowed to sleep in the same bed, no characters in the Sims are allowed to engage in sexual activities. I feel the real danger for children from the Sims comes from it's online version, since all online communities have their share of predators. Sticking to the off-line version may also further your case. That's my opinion at least. Hope this helps.
-j
