Game Discussion of the Week: Metropolismania

If you guys remember some of those out of the blue PlayStation 2 games like OneeChanbara, Global Defence Force, Robot Alchemic Drive, and Monster Attack.

Well, this one was not even remotely as crazy as any of those, but it was a lot of fun, and my cousin and I spend hours building and managing our town, we couldn't put it down.

The PS2 was for me one of those last instances were I can still pick a game I have no idea about and become surprisingly pleased to find something unique and special. This game was definitely an example of that.

I imagine Indi had a lot of success with this game and went ahead and created a sequel, my cousin and I were really excited for it, but when we got it, even though it felt more modern, it lost almost most of the charm of the first one.

Still though, the first game was so interesting that it became one of those games I like to share with people that many probably haven't played, but that sadly at this point, I have no idea how can one get it other than through maybe some kind of emulation.

Wow, was not expecting this one. My brother loved this game when we were kids. I played a good amount of this and Metropolismania 2 as well and enjoyed them both. It's satisfying seeing a barren patch of land transform into a bustling city. When I first played this game I thought it was going to be a SimCity clone but this one plays much differently. The focus is more on the smaller social details of building a city, mainly finding out what each specific resident wants and catering to that need. You can talk with just about every single man, woman, and child who lives in your city. You'll want to kiss their asses as much as possible because that's how you get new residents, businesses, and an overall happier population.

My beef with this game is that sometimes fulfilling people's requests can not work properly or just be outright impossible. Now, when you're working with a huge city it's not possible to please every single person so you'll inevitably get some people who pack up and leave, that's not what I'm referring to. Sometimes when starting out a city it will be awhile before you get enough of the essentials and you'll have no choice but to watch your population dwindle to almost nothing. Other times you'll fulfill a resident's request to the letter but the game bugs out and doesn't count it as solved, resulting in them leaving and you wasting time you could've put towards someone else's request. These hiccups aren't that common but they do happen.