TBT^256: SimEarth

7 May 20266 May 2026 The Portly Politico1 Comment

Yesterday I wrote about how bogus Darwinian evolution is as a theory. It’s one of those concepts that sounds both so radical and logical that it must be groundbreaking and true.

Then you start to examine it more closely and realize it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. There’s an entire Facebook page that just shows weird animals with hyper-specific “adaptations” that are so outlandish, there’s no conceivable way they could have gradually “evolved” to that state. Any median point in the process would have made the creature unfit for the conditions. Sometimes, the animals have some odd characteristic that doesn’t even do anything in particular.

That said, the concept of evolution is fun in video games and science fiction. Sure, maybe that’s just pro-Darwinist propaganda embedded into popular culture, but evolution works well in the context of a video game, where progression is encouraged through rewards. I’ve always liked games with a grand scope that require incremental improvements over time.

Of course, even those games prove intelligence: the development of a species, or a civilization, or someone’s neighborhood in The Sims, is itself a process of intentional, ordered choices. Granted, players aren’t God, but they get to guide development over many turns or rounds or what not.

That’s all to say that I loved playing SimEarth back in the day.

With that, here is 8 May 2025’s “TBT^16: SimEarth“:

TBT^16: SimEarth

8 May 20254 May 2025 The Portly Politico4 Comments

The big news in the gaming world right now is the incredible The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. It came as a total shock to the gaming world (yeah, there were rumors swirling that it was in the works, but no one knew it was coming so soon), and managed to update the game’s graphics and fix some bugs while also maintaining the legendary “jank” for which the game is so fondly remembered.

Yours portly has not yet taken the dive back into Cyrodiil (although, goodness, I am desperate to do so), but I am looking forward to the rapidly-approaching summer for a chance to dig into some classic games. It’s been so long since I’ve really been able to sit down and lose myself for hours into a good game. I haven’t even been able to touch Civilization VII in almost two months!

Gaming always comes to my mind during the hot, lazy days of summer, when it’s so unbearable outside, I l basically live like my home is a life support pod on Venus, only venturing out when absolutely necessary. So it was that I booted up old SimEarth some years ago, and took a rose-tinted, nostalgia-fueled walk back to my past, when I first played a copy of the game my Indian friend copied onto a 3.5″ floppy disk for me. Those were the days!

With that, join me on this extended walk through the past; here is 16 May 2024’s “TBT^4: SimEarth“:

Lazy Sunday CCCVI: Old Tech

27 April 202524 April 2025 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

I have been a blast unearthing some old technology, so this weekend’s Lazy Sunday is dedicated to the glory of ancient tech:

“TBT^4: SimEarth” (and “TBT^2: SimEarth“; “TBT: SimEarth“; and “SimEarth“) – a classic, DOS-y Sim experience.
“Ancient Alien Technology” – a post about an old Zip drive and a “palmtop” computer.
“Phone it in Friday LXXXVII: YouTube Roundup LXXXVII: Ancient Alien Technology” – videos of the aforementioned technologies.

More ancient alien technology to come!

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

TBT^4: SimEarth

16 May 202416 May 2024 The Portly Politico54 Comments

May. It’s the superfluous final month of school. There’s not enough time to cover any new content, but too much time to launch right into exam review. The result: an odd limbo in which neither students or teachers wish to dwell. It’s the time of year when everyone is in on the game of modern education—we’d all be better off doing and being somewhere else, but we’re still going through the rituals of an industrial-era factory.

Naturally, with summer looming, I’m getting the itch to do some gaming again. Since finishing Disco Elysium a few weeks ago, I have not played any game deeply. I did purchase Planescape: Torment, the spiritual ancestor of DE, but only managed to get in about an hour of playtime. One of my students asked me earlier this week about Stardew Valley, which I played religiously for about two weeks in probably 2013. That’s a modern classic I want to dust off soon.

As for the ostensible subject of this post, my forays into SimEarth have been nonexistent since those halcyon days of May 2020, when America’s love affair with The Virus was in full swing. Being cooped up in the house got me nostalgic for the classics, but I need to revisit the planet simulator soon.

Big plans for the summer. If I play all these games as planned, my eyeballs might fall out.

With that, here is 11 May 2023’s “TBT^2: SimEarth“:

TBT^2: SimEarth

11 May 20234 May 2023 The Portly Politico8 Comments

The school year is grinding down at an agonizingly slow pace, which means my mind increasingly is turning away from serious matters and towards video games.

As a grown man with too many responsibilities and not enough time, I don’t indulge in video games much anymore. I’ve always been more of a casual gamer in the sense that I play in short spurts for fun of it, not necessarily “beating” (finishing) a game, but enjoying playing with its mechanics or discovering some bit of its story. I play games that would be considered “serious” among gamers, but I don’t do so with the intensity of those more committed gamers.

Increasingly, though, my gaming habits have turned towards more casual games—puzzle games and the like. I don’t do a ton of gaming on my phone, but there are a few that I enjoy.

One of those is TerraGenesis, a game in which you take on the terraforming of a planet. The game starts you with Mars, and by the time you read this post, I should have completed my first successful terraforming of the red planet. The game draws heavily from the style of the board game Terraforming Mars, which is one of my favorites in the “make-this-planet-habitable-for-humans” genre.

Playing that got me thinking about the granddaddy of all terraforming games, SimEarth. I wrote a loving tribute to this DOS classic a few years ago, and it seemed like a good time to give it another look.

With that, here is “TBT: SimEarth“:

TBT: SimEarth

19 May 202217 May 2022 The Portly Politico8 Comments

I’ve been on a video game kick lately, diving back into the Civilization games and listening to a lot of the Gaming Historian on YouTube. As such, it seemed like a good time to look back at another video game post, one about the planet simulator SimEarth.

SimEarth was one of those games that I found instantly appealing—a massive simulator of an entire planet, going through all its geological, biological, and civilizational phases. Even growing up in a household that rejected the theory of Darwinian evolution (a theory I still don’t accept, although I acknowledge that adaptation and mutation are both possible and happen frequently), the prevailing scientific understanding of our world made for a fun video game.

The possibilities were endless. Want to be a Deistic god and let the world run on its own? Go for it. Want to interfere frequently in your planet’s development? Do it! Want to make starfish or Venus fly traps sentient beings capable of forging an advanced civilization? Why not!

I used to be able to make pretty compelling planets in this game, with rich histories and multiple species in succession rising to sentience, before heading off an intergalactic journey of the stars. Apparently, I lost any skills I had, as my last game a couple of years ago (detailed below) ended in nuclear winter. Oops.

With that, here is 27 May 2020’s “SimEarth“:

Lazy Sunday CXI: Bric-a-Brac II

2 May 20212 May 2021 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

In the spirit of yesterday’s Subscribe Star post “Bric-a-Brac,” it seemed like a good time to do another miscellaneous edition of Lazy Sunday. Blogging daily means there are a plethora of miscellaneous posts that don’t necessarily fit into any major category, but as I noted in yesterday’s post, miscellany is the spice of life.

“SimEarth” – I’ve been jonesing lately for four or five uninterrupted hours to sit down and play video games. I’m a grown man with many responsibilities, but every now and then I want to spend an afternoon playing Civilization VI, conquering the world via cultural influence as France. Las summer while recovering from a mystery illness I had the time to do some gaming, and dove back into the classic planet simulation SimEarth. This post details my pitiful attempts at playing God.
“Fast Food Premium” – This post, which is about UBI and the perils it presents, uses the fast food industry to illustrate the point. Blogger buddy jonolan at Reflections from a Murky Pond generously reblogged it, providing his own, more in-depth commentary to supplement my brief sketch of the idea. I highly recommend you check out his post.
“SubscribeStar Saturday: Bric-a-Brac” (post on my SubscribeStar page) – The meat of this post is behind the paywall, so the preview just makes it sound like a self-indulgent essay on the toys on a windowsill in my kitchen. My point is deeper, though: little figurines, decorations, etc., aren’t merely pleasant trappings; they’re individual little touches that express our individuality, our creativity, and our liberty. Little touches give life and warmth to our homes.

Well, that’s it! Here’s hoping you enjoy this slightly-belated edition of Lazy Sunday.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

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SimEarth

27 May 202027 May 2020 The Portly Politico3 Comments

Yesterday I wrote about SimRefinery, the oil refinery software lost to time (I’m praying it’s sitting on a long-forgotten floppy disk somewhere). What I didn’t tell you was that I had succumbed to a mild but annoying stomach virus, so I was essentially useless for the rest of the day.

Of course, what better way to spend one’s time when sick than with video games? After writing about SimEarth and doing some nostalgic reading about the world-building simulator, I tracked down a playable DOS version. A helpful commenter also linked to the game’s 200-plus-page manual, which is necessary for accessing the game. Anyone familiar with 1990s-era computer technology will recall that, in order to prevent piracy, games would often ask users to look up some piece of information buried in the manual, the theory being that if you owned the game legally, you’d have the manual.

During this sickly walk down memory lane, I realized how much I had forgotten about SimEarth. The game is more complicated than I remember. It’s not that deep, but what makes it difficult is balancing all the different inputs to your planet—the amount of sunlight, how much of that sunlight is reflected by the clouds and the surface, how much cloud cover to have, how quickly animals mutate and reproduce, how frequently meteors strike the surface, etc., etc.

The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

Tag: SimEarth