Let's Play SimLife!

So.

I'm not going to lie, this game may be responsible for my career path. I do not want to know how many creatures, game saves and etc. I had back in the day.

An important caveat of this LP is that I ADORE BIOLOGY. I am perfectly happy to sit here and tweak genes and play with settings and watch the population change by looking at graphs. This is BORING AS HELL for you guys. So if I enter my science zone, feel free to yell NERD to bring me back to reality and send a comet at our poor creatures.

This first update is going to be a basic "Hey look at what we can do", most of which will be pulled from the game's tutorial, after that things will get more open-ended and audience participation will be necessary.

SimLife is, in short, about creating an ecosystem. To begin with, you design a world:



I will get into all the specifics later, but let's just say you have a LOT of control. Now that you have the world, it's time to add some life.

Specifically, plants:



Plants begin as seeds and will sprout if the conditions are correct.

What are the correct conditions, you ask? Well, every plant is different. I've planted some very spiteful Aloe plants above, and after letting some time pass I noticed more of the seeds on the right had sprouted. What different conditions could there be?


Temperature


Moisture


and soil depth.

The green dots in the upper left corner are the sprouted plants. I guess Aloes are desert plants. WHO KNEW? Plants are also affected by the seasons, but this LP will probably focus on animals, so I'm not going to worry about that for now.

Speaking of animals, let's add some!



Specifically, Llamas. Because they're awesome.

You could just plop the llamas down and see if they eat the aloe and go on your way, but that's lame.

What you want to do is play around with their lives.



This is the variables screen. Every seed, plant and animal has one and you can manipulate the values as much as you like. The organisms can as well (drinking water refills the water meter, etc.), but it can be interesting to follow one animal around for a bit and see how it behaves.

Hey, look, this Llama is slightly along in her pregnancy!

Let's speed that up.



Yes, you can even control when the animals give birth.

But you want more control, you say?



This is the very basic biology lab. Draw adult and child versions of the animals, control some basic parameters of the species and possibly force the existing population to act how you want them to.

Not good enough for you?



This is where many people reading this LP probably closed the window in disgust.

But this is where I spend most of my time when I play the game. This is also what I'll often be playing with if people suggest something and I can't quite make it worth under the current conditions. The amount of things you can tweak in your animal population is downright amazing (This is also true of plants, but again, this will probably focus on animals).

There are a number of other data windows to follow in this game, but they aren't necessary to play it.



The goal of this game is to have a thriving, diverse ecosystem that can handle disasters and never has any extinctions occur. Will we get to a point like that? Maybe! We'll see.

For now, let's do something easy. I'll populate a smallish map with all the default plants and let's try and get a herbivore population up and running.

For example:







Anyway, suggestions? Land-based non-carnivores for now, please. Feel free to suggest anything as broad or specific as you like (I reposted the parameters on purpose!). Appearance suggestions are welcome as well, although please note that I'm limited by colors and pixels.

And I suppose we could use these guys if we wanted to.

So, so many sliders . . . This looks fascinating, but I'm glad I'm not the one playing it.

Anyway, I vote for an ecosystem populated by FOEs, starting with a nice cute li'l ragelope

Seconded.

I reserve raptorsnakes when we start on carnivores.

This game looks super intimidating! I look forward to you showing us the ins and outs of it, even if it involves copious amounts of SCIENCE.

Can you make it so they reproduce in swarms? Just showering the planet with a carpet of green and orange?

Let this be a lesson to you ladies.

Do you have the manual handy? It would be kind of neat to scan the cartoons about genetic manipulation.

Ok, wait... I haven't read the whole post yet, but after skimming the pictures I just have to mention this. I had a board game as a kid that was based on an evolution mechanic and used the *exact* same three-part animal cards with various attributes as I see in that animal shot. However, it wasn't SimLife branded, and I think it may have in fact pre-dated it. I can't for the life of me remember the name of it, though. This is going to bother me for some time.

Not quite swarms, but I can make them have litters of 8 which is a pretty good start.

That is planned, but I couldn't find the box of old computer stuff when I looked in the garage. I'm going to double check this weekend.

I LOVE THIS GAME SO MUCH.

i used to spend hours and hours and hours creating new genotypes and phenotypes, and i loved the comic in the manual. this game made me want to be a genetic engineer so badly, even though i suck at math =(

Man, I loved this game, and have been really looking forward to this LP.

Request: go full-on nerd-out! Graphs! Charts! Equations! That kind of thing is exciting to me~

This looks awesome, and I never knew that it existed!

I woud have totally spent hours on this as a kid.

SimLife and SimEarth got no love, which is a shame, because they are both fantastic.

edit: sound! simple demo with the title screen music (albeit for slightly too long), which I always liked.

How long until we get access to flight? We're going to need some crocodeagles on this planet.

I want to see FULL NERD MODE for this game because I remember liking it, but never really being able to get into it. If I actually knew how to play I'd pick it up again.

I too want full nerd mode because I like seeing something done that I could never do myself. This could be so awesome. I've never played this game. So many possibilities...

Here's my vote for an eventual animal:



I'm really not sure whether its a herbivore or carnivore, though...

An omnivore, of course!

This game seems to have everything I expected from Spore's earlier stages but never saw.

I loved SimEarth for the Super Nintendo, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

The music was special.

Better yet, let's do as many Mother 3 chimeras as we can.

Oh, and F.O.E.s too, maybe.

And maybe finish the thread off at some point with some sort of long-living hellbeast that devours everything in its path and reproduces in swarms. Mwahahaha.

Wow, that's completely different from the version I'm playing. I made a video to show it, then realized I can't deprive all of you of the "Ooh La La!" mating noise and the birth and death sounds. I adjusted the variables to speed up a pregnancy and the final message was that the highlighted animal died. Seems Toastyfrogs don't like cold mountains!

We'll see how well these herbivores go! I seem to remember that a half-eagle half-iguana thing is already in the game, but I'll have to check.

Where is that from? I like it! Sharkaroo!

Did you hit start on the title screen right as the planet zoomed by? I never ceased to be amused by that crazy high-pitched whine.

My plan was to just unleash as many disasters as possible. Large amounts of carnivores aren't too easy to manage in this game because it really tries to be realistic so the ecosystem can't handle too many of them. I could certainly make it work, though.

And the comics in the manual for everyone's reading pleasure:





















I highly approve of the UCSC shirt. Awesome.

Also, the game comes with a lab notebook:









The drawings and notes on the cover are pre-printed. I'm not THAT much of a dork.

excited! Looking forward to a rough simulacrum of science!

I never got the win3.1 version working totally great (re: conversation a month or two ago).. I went back and tested and I'm pretty sure both versions have the same start up screen music. That youtube video is actually a non-playable demo that was released, but the music in the demo is what's played (sometimes) during regular gameplay.

I definitely don't remember the love-sounds, though..

Speaking of versions: what version are you using on what platform under what emulation etc etc?

Man, I lost my boxed versions years ago, I need to find another one so I can have the manual for my collection. I've got some SimCity manuals but haven't looked at them in awhile, I'd forgotten how great Maxis was.

I'm playing it on my old G4 desktop tower, which I mainly use as an external hard drive these days. I guess it's technically emulation since I'm running Classic while in OS X, but I'm using Mac OS 9.2.

This is straight off a 3.5" floppy, as far as I know there weren't multiple versions but I'll check.

It's the Parental Kangashark from Mother 3. The game has all sorts of mixtures: Ostrelephant, Monkalrus, Batangutan, Cattlesnake, Pigtunia, Dogfish

You can't happen to make hippos with missiles attached, can you?