The Tower SP

Overview

The Tower SP is an unlikely port of SimTower for the Game Boy Advance but perhaps deserved a little better.

Review

While it appears on the /v/'s Recommended Games Wiki if you're looking for some good games to play on the Game Boy Advance, The Tower SP isn't the most well-known of Game Boy Advance titles and I think it wasn't even in Wal-Mart when it was released...it was a very obscure title when it was released as it was already after the Nintendo DS had taken flight as the successor console to the Game Boy Advance. I've reviewed SimTower and I only mentioned (but didn't talk about) The Tower SP.

I was very pleased when The Tower SP came out. It was published by Sega, which had published Yoot Tower for Mac in 1998 (and PC in 1999), and despite their promise to bring the Statue of Liberty module over (though as I would find out years later when I wrote about it for Yoot Tower Guides the Statue of Liberty module was weird and not that fun) they were ready to give the series a second shot in the U.S., again, without the SimTower name (which I think hurt sales), especially everything that happened to Sega since the Yoot Tower days......the failure of the Saturn and Dreamcast nearly killed the company, and a merger with Sammy Corporation in 2004...held onto the relations with Yoot Saito in some way to publish The Tower SP in the West.

Among the reasons I wanted to write about this was for some reason, I had gotten it in my head that the PlayStation title The Tower SP: Bonus Edition (which was more like "The Tower 1.5" in terms of features) incorporated restrooms as a major factor in the game. (In Yoot Tower, there are restrooms you need for your commercial areas—shops and restaurants, because after all, what shopping concourse wouldn't have one?) and you could mash the button rapidly to clean them.

As it turns out, what really happened was that I had started a website years ago called "AJ Games" (the files all date back to February 2005) and I found out from the archives I keep offline (I had, by some miracle, kept them on my Dropbox instead of a long-lost hard drive buried somewhere) that this is what I had first learned about The Tower SP well over a year before it was released in the United States, it was never from The Tower: Bonus Edition.

In any case, I do remember having a lot of fun playing the early game of The Tower SP as it let me play SimTower in a whole new way, but after a while I started getting a bit burned out. Not only did the graphics obviously take a nosedive but they had ALSO demanded that I put in office cleaner tenants but the manual didn't tell you that could only put a certain number of things of these things inside your tower, so I basically sidelined it. I recently opened up my old cartridge to find out that was probably the reason it got pushed out of the active playing list some years before. (At the same time, I probably forgot I could increase the staff, so I'll have to check back).

In addition to the office cleaner part, the whole game is paced a bit differently, the map's much smaller and by the time I ran out of office cleaners I had already placed the metro station, something that's fairly late game in SimTower. There's also an advisor you have, Yamanouchi, though he says you can call him Yama. While there's a longplay on YouTube, that looks like it's for a "General Commercial Building" implying there are others to pick once you beat it. The game as a whole seems poorly documented, a tragic symptom of its situation.

I think it's an acquired taste overall. I can see why it got middling reviews in an era when they already started handing out 9/10s for anything that doesn't suck, but it doesn't mean it deserved the ratings it got. Game journalists are just wrong sometimes (okay, a lot of the time), but you already knew that, right?

Player Notes

I bought this game NEW when it came out in April 2006, I might be one of the few people who bought it on release. Having replayed a bit of it for this review (written June 2026) with screenshots, I kinda want to get back into it, but there are other things on my backlog.

Port & Rerelease Notes

I'm not sure if it could be considered a port or separate game, but The Tower DS looks pretty similar (it was published by Nintendo and did not get a U.S. release, likely because The Tower SP fared poorly critically and commercially), but apparently the touch-screen capability is not as well-implemented with a lot of the gameplay still based on the D-pad. With only a few videos it's hard to tell.

Screenshots

Yamanouchi is here to help.

The interface draws heavily from the computer versions.

Like The Tower: Bonus Edition, the restaurants make a difference.