Mayor (City)

"Mayor (City)" was developed by loque for a RPG Maker Breach Contest that was meant to push the limits of the developers chosen engine. In loque's case he/she chose to show what you can do with RPG Maker 2000 if you throw out the rule book. As you can imagine a game this innovative did rather well with both the judges as well as in the public opinion polls for the contest.

Though oddly enough my biggest gripe about "Mayor (City)" has nothing to do with how it plays, looks, or feels, but with people comparing it to "SimCity". My issue with this comparison is that "SimCity" allows you to build things in any order you choose while "Mayor (City)" has clear prerequisites for building anything beyond wells. If anything this game feels more like a demo for making something like "Romopolis" or "Metropolismania".

This isn't a bad thing in my opinion, but it means this game feels more like a puzzle game in my opinion. After all, are goal is to ultimately build a certain number of every building type in the game with the confined space offered. Admittedly this isn't a major hurdle in "Mayor (City)" since the game only includes one stage and there's plenty of space to fit all of the required buildings, but if this game had multiple levels I could see this becoming a major issue as you try to work around areas where you can't build structures because of obstacles like trees or rivers getting in the way of your building. Add in a need to keep an eye on your resources which come in the forms of food, money, and citizenry and you have the basics for a pretty solid puzzle game.

On the graphical side of things the game makes use of the resources found within the RTP for RPM Maker 2000 as far as I can tell, but considering the goal of the contest was to push the limits of the engine you were working with. I'm not particularly surprised that loque decided to stick with the default assets on this front.

On the sound side of things we get some relaxing music which is one of the few things that does remind me of "SimCity" in this game. After all, you really need proper music to make building a virtual city feel meaningful in my opinion.

At any rate, I'd suggest giving this game a look if you want to see just how far you can push RPG Maker 2000 in some respects. And hopefully some day we will get a proper puzzle game about building towns/cities within the confines of a given map at some point in the future.