Sim Everything music review

King of Posters
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SimCity 2000 (N64 Version)

This is the post where I find out there were two Sim City games for the N64, and this is not the one I thought it was. This is a fairly straight port of the PC game, although it appears to add some exciting new features such as:

  • Horse racing
  • A dating sim
  • Gardening
  • A space shooter

All translated here: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/n64/574532-simcity-2000/faqs/79849/mini-game-translation

Unfortunately, the soundtrack is mostly the same as the PC release! Except the instrumentation is worse.

However, it has more songs than the PC game, and a few of them are pretty weird. Unfortunately, I don’t have any context for these since they’re just named BGM ##. I assume most of the new tracks are for the newly added minigames. Highlights include:

BGM 14

This sounds to me like something that could have been in a Castlevania game on the GBA. The bass line is real nice and it’s got a sort of ominous organ vibe:

BGM 16

An extremely cute little bossa nova ditty. I bet this was for the dating game. Honestly I wish it was longer, it’s so pleasant:

BGM 20

Sounds like the opening of a sentai show:

All in all, it’s mostly annoying but I’m super glad I checked it out anyway just to learn about Sim City 2000 (N64)

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SimCity 2000 (Sega Saturn Version)

I swear to god i actively dislike this soundtrack now. perhaps this is because the Sega Saturn version is my 5th time on this merry go round.

It sounds slightly better, i guess, but I have nothing else to say about it.

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SimCity 2000 (SNES Version)

Mercifully only ten minutes. Some of the songs seem new but they’re not good.

This is one of the first games I ever emulated, mostly on the strength of the SimCity soundtrack. Guess what? This one is chintzy and bad sounding.

Not much else to say there for me.

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SimCity 2000 (Sony PlayStation Version)

SAME SOUNDTRACK

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excited for you to get to simcity 3000 and hear the many melodies that get stuck in my head and then i forget about them until they pop up again

also Power Grid and Infrastructure

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How come they never did Sim Dolphin? They shoulda done Sim Dolphin while they still could.

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As the forum’s #1 SimCopter and Streets of SimCity fan, wishing for Maxis to make an action game is a real monkey’s paw

You could try SimEarth, SimLife or SimIsle for oceanic / biopunk / tropical vibes…

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Wow, I really forgot SimIsle existed. I always wanted that game when I was a kid because it has KILLER box art:

SimIsle-Missions-in-the-Rainforest

But looking at screenshots, it looks like the world’s most boring game.

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I bought a copy of SimIsle at a goodwill or something, and when I got home the disc that was in it was Streets of Sim City, which I already had. So I never played it, but in my mind…it was the best game ever…

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SimCity 3000

Okay what’s going on with this collection, this only has two songs in it. and it’s less than 2 minutes long.

and then it has another disc called “SimCity3000 Unlimited” which has the same two songs, but then also the rest of the soundtrack

anyway this seems like a mistake but for completionism it’s here

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You must embrace the Maxis, my friend. Let go of your console conditioning, your petty demand for “entertainment”

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SimCity 3000 Unlimited

This soundtrack is really really good. The lead composer is Jerry Martin, who would go on to do the Very Good Soundtrack for The Sims, and it’s a step above anything that’s come before. Specifically, the production values are incredibly high and include tons of live performances. You can tell that people worked really really hard on this.

It comes in at just under 2 hours (!) of music split over 23 tracks, and varies from new-agey to electronica to jazz to big band and some other songs I’d be hard-pressed to put into any genre. Here are a few of the standout tracks to me:

Power Grid

Power Grid is definitely one of my favorites. The weird burbly sounds and the alien-sounding speech remind me very much of one of my other favorite sim-style games, Startopia (which also has a pretty good soundtrack). It develops very nicely as well, just like most of these tracks do, and it never gets old to listen to.

Magic City

I previously wrote about my fondness for the track Magic City:

“Relentless optimism about urban living” is the vibe for most of these in one way or another, and Magic City is probably the best track to represent this. I love how it builds to these beautiful crescendos and then dips back into valleys of almost new-age calmness. The way that it repeats single notes over a long period of time, then shifts them all at once is just…dazzling.

Sim Broadway

This is another beautifully optimistic track, and it reminds me a lot of Monopoly Tycoon’s 30’s era music but like…better. I love the cheeky…marimba? Whatever that is. But yeah just a light and airy track in the revered tradition of City Music i.e. Rhapsody In Blue Forever

So yeah, another high watermark after the SNES SimCity OST. Hugely impressive work here.

Also for some reason it has the title track to SimCity 2000 which almost made me lose my mind, like it was specifically trolling me. But otherwise it’s great.

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SimCity 4

This is another big one. 25 songs, over 2 hours of music. Jerry Martin’s here again with a bunch of collaborators - hard to tell who did what but we’ll just assume it’s all a team effort.

This often falls into the Meditative But Energetic camp of music, and it’s really really good at what it does. A great example of this is By the Bay

That really lovely repetitive vibraphone (?), the atmospheric oboe (?), and the restraint it takes to introduce an electric guitar three minutes in…it’s just such a good tune. And almost all of it is this good! There are no stinkers.

I really like Re-Development as well:

It just kind of builds and builds but never really goes anywhere in particular - it stays in its lane, right? Like, it’s not trying to be EPIC MUSIC TO EPIC TO, it’s more like a building being erected over time. It is what it is at all times, it’s just more of itself as time goes on.

Or it’s Street Sweeper:

Which gets really close to being a drum n bass track. I think I actually included it in the VGDNB set I did last year. Maybe. Anyway this track kicks ass too.

So yeah, it’s a great great great OST. Just tremendous stuff.

Weird thing about this collection is that it lumped in the Rush Hour expansion music as well, so let’s talk about this now:

SimCity 4: Rush Hour

This one is slightly weirder to talk about, but it’s so good. 12 songs, over an hour of music. This one oscillates between electronic tracks similar in vibe to the base game, and some of the most incredible atmospheric orchestral music I’ve ever heard. Four of the tracks are clearly performed by a live orchestra, and they’re incredible. Fucking listen to this:

This is beautiful. Like, eye-wateringly gorgeous. I don’t usually have this reaction to orchestral music but something about this gets to me. Listen to this one!!

It’s weirdly foreboding and wandering but something about it is just so god damned good.

I feel like you could package the orchestral music alone and ignore all the more standard stuff and it would just be like, 21 minutes of gorgeous music. In fact, I made a playlist just of these 4 tunes because they’re so good:

The rest of the songs in this are good! But they don’t blow me away. I think these four tracks might be the best music totally on their own that I’ve yet heard (in this thread). I don’t think you need any context for these whatsoever, they’re just beautiful.

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yeah!!

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No! More marimba!! (but it’s obviously a midi patch and doesn’t really sound like a real one)

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SimCity Classic

Okay so this appears to be the windows version of SimCity, although I don’t know why it’s called SimCity Classic. It seems like EA renamed it at some point, but i’m unclear on when/why/how.

Anyway, 3 songs, ~7 minutes of music. BGM1 is what seems to mostly play while playing the game, and I’m not sure what BGM2 is.

BGM1 is actually pretty good!

It has an unusual rhythm to it, and the transition to being like, a different song 2 minutes in is pretty cool. I like it!

BGM2 is bad and appears to be playing incorrectly.

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i cannot believe you didnt post the simcity 4 song that is disabled by default for being too twisted…

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yeah that one felt really out of context, i figured it was like, when a disaster happened or something

that’s wild!

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SimCity Jr.

This is a Japan only Super Famicom port of Sim Town, a PC game that was basically SimCity but for kids. It was apparently not that good.

But who cares! I’m here for the music.

10 tracks, ~24 minutes of music. 3 of the tracks are pretty boring - this is because they are straight conversions of the PC game, which only had 3 tracks that were pretty boring. The remaining 7 are shockingly good for the most part.

There’s this cute little bossa nova number that I find deeply charming:

Then there’s this very nice music-box sounding track that reminds me of the RPG Tsukuru 2 OST for some reason:

It’s sweet and mellow but still fairly complex. It’s just good!

But to me, the standout is this 55 second track called “Medal/Achievement Screen:”

I don’t feel qualified to describe this but it reminds me of Knower somehow. It’s just like, the best 55 seconds of music I’ve ever heard? I feel like you could lay an MF Doom vocal over this or something, it’s just this like dripping jazzy weirdness. It really shocked me when I heard it the first time.

This doesn’t reach the highs or consistency of the SNES SimCity OST but it’s super unique and cool. I definitely expected just some fucken clown music, but no. It’s good.

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SimCoaster

Speaking of fucken clown music…

This is the sequel to Sim Theme Park (or Theme Park World) and the music is similarly structured. 9 songs but nearly 2 hours of music.

Unfortunately, whereas Sim Theme Park was kind of cool and ambitious, this music is…not. There are three 30 minute tunes and like the last game, I assume they built up over time to have more and more instruments.

The problem is that they start much heavier than the other ones. Where Sim Theme Park was content to let you sit with just some drums and noises for like, 23 minutes, this one jumps in on the melody right away. Basically it shows its hand almost immediately, and any buildup is really just repetition of the same elements. Except more at a time, sometimes.

The worst offender is the “Land of Invention” track which has so many god damned HONK HONK sound effects mixed in with all sorts of other annoying clunks and clanks and sproings that it’s hellish. It doesn’t help that the only melody is about 10 seconds long, so it just repeats that once in a while. And then the tempo increases so it’s just more HONK sproing CLANK plink plink plink HONK HONK

Fucking terrible. And that’s from a noted clown-liking weirdo.

Anyway, don’t recommend. I had a hell of a time getting through it all.

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