SimEarth: The Living Planet (1993)

This was one of my favorite games growing up. Before buying it I had rented it so many times that I probably bought the game twice. I spent many hours fooling around with random planets and doing the scenarios. Everything from normal worlds, desert worlds with jungle or swamp at the poles, and frozen ice worlds. I liked making the tricordates sentient and also fun with robots and carniferns. I even found a trick way back then about how to make sentient bacteria. As far as I know, no one else knows how to do it. Take a single stone age civilization unit of any species, use a plague on it, wait for the plague to finish and then place a new civilization unit before you get the notice that civilization has been destroyed. Boom a civilization of bacteria. I like to think of it as some kind of collective bacterial intelligence that takes over the bodies of more advanced life, kind of like zombie apocalypse.

Played the game again in recent years (around 2018) on emulator. I let it run from start to the death of the sun using high speed in about an hour to see what would happen. Oceans, life and civilization develop naturally. Civilization advances and leaves the planet, leaving room for the next. This continues until one civilization screws up the planet too much that it cannot recover, though the only situation that does not allow life and civilization is an ice world, which would be caused by nuclear war. No extremes happened during my trial run. On default settings, mammals and whales are the top life and usually develop civilization. Increasing the advancement value while not having the mutation value too high makes it more likely that more primitive life will develop civilization. I know how to manipulate the features of the planet to get it, life and civilization to do what I want, to the point where I am pretty sure I could write a good guide for this game.

I beat all of the scenarios and made sure to use my knowledge about the game to do it quickly and easily. The final one where the earth is in ruins and overrun with robots was the hardest. Using the flood gift is a bad idea because using volcanoes to get enough land back is expensive and makes an already polluted hot atmosphere even worse. So I had the idea to use fires to kill the robots manually but found out that they die off on their own if you just wait. Plant life has trouble flourishing in this scenario for some reason, so you need biome generators. Then just pump up the values for life and sit back and let things develop. After that I wanted to play around with a random planet where the robots would not die out. It currently has robots dominating the land with other life here and there. Whales dominate the oceans. Robots are the current civilization and whales and mammals have had civilizations.

I love this game and it would be my #1 recommended game for a child, because of the educational value.