SimPark is an oldie but a goodie, and it can keep you occupied on those boring rainy days for a few hours.
Gameplay
In SimPark, you are the head ranger of your own national park...although it's never officially called a national park. Right off the bat, you decide where in the Untied States ( and a bit of Canada) where you want your park to be. There is a big choice in where you put you put you park, because, there are different climate regions in different areas. For instance, if you want to place your park in Texas, the climate would be hot, and dry, so plants like cacti, and specific kinds of animals would thrive here, and then if you put your park around the West Coast, you'd get more precipitation, and coller temeratures. It all depends what kind of species of plants and animals you want to see in your park.
The parks have a pre-determined layout, but you can choose which one you want. The game will keep generating maps until you're happy with one, and then your start the game.
The building aspect of the game is basically put into three of the following groups: People Stuff, Plants and Animals; and to keep your park equalized there are a lot of difficulties in the game, and there has to be a good equalization in your park. For instance, if animal 'A' is overeating animal 'B', you may have to put in animal 'C' to eat animal 'A', which would bring back the balance, so there can be an abundant amount of animal 'B'...whew...
There are little things like that in the game that really make it difficult, challenging, but suprisingly fun. For 'People Stuff' you build tents, benches, gazebos, outhouses, and a lot more. Building gazebos can be a profitable idea to put in your park. People will e-mail you to ask if your gazebo will hold a wedding, or a meeting, or a birthday party, etc. The e-mail function of the game is pretty neat. Other park rangers will mail you asking if you want a specified type of species to be given to your park, for whatever reason, like that they have too many of the species and stuff like that. You will also get e-mail from your cranky old boss (very annoying boss, at that) saying how terrible of a ranger you are...actually, once in a while you will get praise from her...if you did very well, that is. The boss lady will give you badges like a Wolf Badge, and all this is is a sort of ranking system, to see how great you are. Your boss will also urge you to do a little "activity" called Species Identification, all this is is a questionare that will give you a series of questions in order to identify a species. So, for example, the game will give you a picture of a leaf, and it will ask you, is the leaf knobby or smooth, oblong or fat? The game does this to animals and shrubs as well as plants. While it seems a little unnecessary, it is kinda educational, which in this sense isn't a bad thing because it is pretty fun.
So, while laying out your park, you may notice that it is a bit annoying to look around it. You have to use a little compass-like device to move your camera around. It's kind of annoying that you have to drag your mouse to the top right-hand corner to see the parts of the park that you want to see, instead of there being a right-click mouse function or something like that. There is a map that will get you anywhere in your park with just the click of a mouse however, so it's not that bad navigating around your park.
Now, we have to cover one thing, one major, but avoidable annoyance... disasters. Never has a game had such annoying and hard to get rid of disasters. Take Alien Invasion, for an example. It will leave grad-sized pink and blue diamonds shaped items all over your park. Ruinging, pretty well everything. When you look at your map, you will notice that the aliens have sent a message to you, such as 'Release Dorothy' or something like that. Pretty annoying. Then, let's not forget Kudzu! You'll know that your park has gotten Kudzu when you hear this terrible, evil (cheezy) laugh. It's a rapid-spreading weed, and it's very hard to get rid of. You might as well give up your park, and make a new one. There are other disasters, too but these two have to be the worst. Now, please remember. RIGHT WHEN YOU START YOUR PARK GO TO THE TOP OF THE SCREEN (IN THE MENU) AND PLEASE TURN THE DISASTERS OFF! You have been warned! Oh, and turn Rizzo off as well while you're there...do yourself a favor.
The game is plenty of fun to play, and if you have kids, it's something you would want to let them play, it's pretty educational. However, if you're bored, just play thins game, you may be hooked for a few hours.
Sound
The sound quality is not that great. You will constantly hear looping sounds of the animals in your park, in which isn't repetitive, but poor quality.
You can hear your happy camers, or not so happy campers talk about your park if you click them while in the 'microphone option'. Not really that great, but can be useful as to what you should add, or take away to your park. When you use the microphone option on animals and plants, that annoying Rizzo the Frog will give you the info on how it's doing, and if it's being over eaten, or if it's happy, or even if it's thriving.
The sound effects aren't annoying (excluding Rizzo) or repetitive or anything, they just have low quality, but it doesn't really bog down the game's experience.
Graphics
As said before, this game was released in the Quake 1 era.
The graphics are all sprite animations. While sprites may not looks so good now, the level of detail is pretty significant. Maxis did a great job of getting in a lot of realistic detail on the different species of animals, plants, and shrubs.
The Wrap-Up
Overall, SimPark is a great game. Although there are two major annoyances, they both can be turned off. The game offers a challenge as yuo try to equalize the number of different species in your park. The game is highly educational, but that doesn't mean that it's not fun. The game offers a ton of info on all differecnt animal and plant species. If you happen to have this game, you may want to blow the dust off of it a and give it a try again. If you don't own a copy, be sure to keep an eye out for one, it can't be too expensive now, right?