ucity.png

The homebrew community strikes again with a rather surprising fully featured release! µCity (read "Microm City") for the Game Boy Color is the result of dedication by homebrew coder AntonioND, who released version 1.0 of the game a couple of months ago. It flew under our radar until a recent news post in the latest issue of Retro Gamer Magazine, so we decided to give it a try.

We were very pleased to discover a portable version of Super Nintendo's Sim City, copying all the game's features including the excellently designed user interface custom made for joypad control, rather than a mouse and keyboard of the original computer versions. Not only that, but µCity adds plenty of new building choices including Hospitals, Schools, High Schools, Universities and even new energy sources including eco friendly, zero pollution wind farms. But will you pay up for said farms when Coal Power Plants remain so cheap, enabling you to invest city funds on a mass transit system to replace the roadways? Decision, decisions... we started a new city and you can check out gameplay in the video below.

We often wondered how Sim City would fare on the original Game Boy, but sadly when we tried to play this on one a warning message stated that this game would only run on Game Boy Color. So while we are still left to wonder how would all these detailed buildings look like in four shades of green, the fact is the extra colours certainly bring a welcome and quick way to quickly identify buildings on that tiny 160×144 pixel screen.

You can grab the latest version of µCity from the project's Github page. The game will work on any Game Boy Color capable emulator or real hardware using a flash card. We don't know if AntonioND will further update this rather impressive project, but we would love to have some more music variety while we manage the latest pollution crisis.