The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook

Author: Wilson, Johnny L
Publisher: McGraw Hill, 1991
Pages: 193
ISBN: 0-07-881660-2

I really enjoy this book because it's one of the few guides that's not just a helpful guide to the game in question but an enjoyable book in itself. About half of the stuff is the usual strategy--how the simulation works and a general overview of what works and what doesn't. It goes over some of the included cities with the later versions of the game, some of the scenarios, and other features (piecemeal updates were made to the original SimCity over the years with terrain editors, etc.) and how to cheat. Notably, the famous FUND cheat doesn't work in the Commodore-64 version, pressing F1 resets your funds to $4,000 (which is still enough to purchase any one item). There's mention of the NES version of the game which was cancelled early on, but it still seems to be written very pre-release. The NES version lacked many of the Nintendo-exclusive touches the SNES game got, but it still had Dr. Wright (which this book makes no mention of). Despite what it did at the time, SimCity is a relatively simple game and doesn't need all the coverage it gets in this book. As a result, the other half is a bit more interesting--it's about city planning and how it relates to the game, from ancient cities to late 1980s-era Temecula, California.

More unfortunate is that it goes over some of the stuff that is the core of radical urbanist dogma today, such as "new roads don't reduce congestion" and praising Jane Jacobs' "The Life and Death of American Cities", though in the case of the book, it specifically refers to paved roads and the growth of vehicles over time, and the only thing to really take away from it is that they're both positive correlations...but enough on that. It's still an entertaining book and I wish that strategy guides were more like this one.

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