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“:
The Portly Politico 