The Tower SP [GBA]

Tracing its foundations all the way back to a 1995 Windows release, The Tower SP gives players the chance to construct their own skyscrapers, floor by floor. It's a management sim in the Sim City tradition where you constantly watch the thoughts and feelings of your tower's inhabitants and redesign its structure to better meet their needs. Though it shows its 11-year age, and would really have worked better on the Nintendo DS, this is a faithful port of a real classic. If you can handle the rough edges, it'll keep you going for as long as just about any other Game Boy Advance game around.

You start with a few floors of offices, an elevator or two, and maybe a security guard and a cleaner. In a few hours, you'll be building condos, fast food joints, and underground parking. Later still, you'll find yourself trying to figure out the right elevator system to get the crowds flooding into your subway station all the way up to the movie theater on the 45th floor without annoying your hotel guests on the way. Tower starts slowly, but develops into a complex building sim.

Careful planning of elevators, stairs, and escalators is needed to avoid congestion and resulting stress. Office workers, hotel guests, and condo residents all come and go at different times, and need different facilities. Luckily, it's easy to see what factors are currently annoying any particular tower user, so you can at least understand your construction's issues without too much effort.

Fixing them is generally a lot harder, requiring the kind of careful strategic decisions that are the hallmark of a well-designed management game -- to balance up front investment with long-term return, judge how a change will affect existing systems, and where it fits into your overall strategic plan.

Tower starts slowly, and an integrated tutorial does a fine job of teaching you these mechanics. Even though this is a business sim, and one with an interface that isn't immediately obvious, you could easily play it without even glancing at the manual.

On the graphics side... well, it's a GBA game and a few years old. Keep your expectations reasonable and you shouldn't be disappointed. Generally speaking, the visuals for each tower facility are recognizable, but even if you do find them confusing, a quick tap of a button reveals their function.

Some of the interface feels crowded and many screens are crammed with somewhat cryptic abbreviations. Perhaps this is a side-effect of translating the game from the more compact Japanese written language and not changing the button layout. You'll get used to it, but it could have been done better.

Don't expect blistering pace or modern gameplay conventions. Sim Tower is over a decade old, and looks it. But if you're looking for something a little more cerebral to play on your GBA (or your DS, for that matter), Tower perfectly captures the timeless, relaxing fun of building something vast and complicated, and sitting back and watching it work.