Price:	$19.95		Reviewed by:	David Eaton
Supplied:	LDW Software		Review date:	11/04/2005
Pros:	Real-time game play Addcitive 70+ villagers Detailed graphics Only 3.6mb Responsive developer Search function- easy to find villagers		Cons:	3.6mb may be still be large for some device- "Lite" version possibly coming soon!

My youngest son and I have a weekly tradition: Every Thursday night we get together and watch the latest installment of Survivor on television. While I have lost track of just how many seasons of this hit show have aired on CBS, they all have one thing in common: the struggle by a group of people to survive in whatever remote setting in which they have been placed. I often wonder as I watch the show – how would I do in that same circumstance.  Putting aside the challenges for a moment (designed to eliminate players until the final two at which point one is awarded $1 million by a jury of former survivors….), how would I handle things if I were put into the position of being the leader of a tribe.  Would I make the right decisions with regards to maintaining an adequate food supply?  How about choosing the right people to build a hut?  Would I make the right decisions with regards to the occasional events that would surprise us such as sudden storms or wild animals stealing our food supply?   Well, Thanks to LDW, I now have the chance to try my luck at all these things with their newest, sure to be an award winner, game called Village SIM.   Just as the name implies, Village SIM is a real-time simulator of an island village in which you make the decisions as to the activities of the tribe. The game begins with a short introduction in which you discover that a small band of survivors from a distant island get washed up onto a beach of a new island.  While there are some signs of previous inhabitation (the game begins with a few huts and a well already in place, you must decide how to allocate your live resources (i.e.: the 5-6 villagers that you start with) in an effort to develop more of what you need – food, more huts, etc.   What really struck me while I played this game was the “free will” that each of the villagers displayed.  While you could give one of them a task to do they, just like in human life, may decide to do it for a while before loosing interest and going off to explore an area of the island or to try their hand at another project.  Even the effort to get them to enter into relationships would sometimes work and sometimes flop.  You should have seen poor Uan running away every time I tried to hook him up with Sekia.  (Hey, I can’t help it that he found her unattractive…. I though she was kinda cute!) I’m not going to spend a lot of time detailing how to play the game (full instructions can be found here…) but I found the game very easy to play and something that I could pull out of my pocket whenever I had a spare moment to check on the status of my villagers, re-assign them to new tasks if needed, or respond to any events that had happened while I was a way. You see Village SIM, just like real live, continues the tradition set forth by Plant Tycoon and Fish Tycoon (two more wonderful games by LDW) and continues to play even when you are not actually in the game.  Yes, you can pause the game if needed (as well as choose from three different game speeds), but that is a little like sleeping on the job if you ask me and takes a lot of the fun out of the game. Playing Village SIM is kind like playing God.  If you want a villager to pick berries, select him (or her) by tapping on him and then drag him over the berry bush and drop him.  Depending on how adept (or inept… LOL) he is, you may need to do it a few times before he gets the idea and begins foraging for food.  During the course of this activity he will gain experience and be more likely to do this same activity in the future – even without telling him to so. Of course the villagers, as I mentioned before, act just like teenagers in that they, to a certain extent, have “free will” and will go off and do other things instead of what you have tasked them to do.  It gets frustrating at times when you set a few guys to gathering food and come back to find them wasting time doing something else but I show them who’s boss.  I just drag them down and drop them into the ocean to teach them a lesson!  (LOL)   It really doesn’t teach them anything but it sure makes me feel better…. As you take care of your tribe it is necessary to develop Tech Points by doing research.  These tech points can then be spend to upgrade your tribe’s ability to perform different tasks.  For example, before your berries run out you will want to upgrade your Harvesting to allow you to grow a garden.  Later you can upgrade it yet again and your villagers will obtain the knowledge of how to fish and catch crabs (no jokes, please…) thus providing an endless supply of food. Another thing that is necessary, and I have already alluded to it, is to breed your villagers.  You do this by dragging a girl on top of a guy or visa versa.  If they hit it off the status bar at the bottom will tell you that they are embracing.  If they really hit it off you will hear a kissing noise and they will “go indoors” into the Love Shack (affectionately called the Bootie Hut by the beta testers…) The occasional result of this visit to the Love Shack will be a new tribe member.  (Last Sunday I was in a meeting at church and, while waiting for it to begin, pulled out my Zodiac and began a concentrated breeding effort to try to build up my tribe.  I got some mighty strange looks when folks asked me what I was so intent on – and I told them…. )  As in real life, the mother will need to spend a considerable amount of time nursing and caring for the baby.  When it reaches toddler stage it, just like real life, seems to have three times the energy of the parents and will scurry around checking out the island. As you play the game and build your tribe you are also given the opportunity to solve twelve different puzzles.  Some of these will be an absolute requirement if you want your tribe to grow while others may seem like an added bonus.  Many of these are inter-related in that you have to solve one of them before you have the ability to solve the next one.  Once all the puzzles are solved that doesn’t mean that you have finished the game – just that you have solved the puzzles.  You will still need to keep your tribe going and maintain everyone’s health unless you decide to perform mass genocide and wipe everyone out by starting a new game. The game itself offers superb graphics and animations.  It is amazing how you can have so many villagers (the game used to create these screen shots had 75 villagers at one time) wandering around taking care of different tasks and yet still learn to recognize them by their clothing, hair color, etc. and mourn their loss when they die due to old age or sickness. The main game screen is in two parts.  You can zoom out for bird’s eye view of the entire village area and watch the little ant-size villagers as they complete their chores or tap anywhere on the map to zoom in and concentrate on a particular villager.  Once you have chosen a villager you can assign him to a task by dragging him or her to that hot spot (the berry bush for example) or pull up the Villager Detail screen where you can see their health status, age, skill levels, and even check a skill that you want them to focus on when not being actively tasked to another assignment. Handy scroll arrows under the paper doll figure of the villager will allow you to scroll rapidly through the villagers (they seem to be sorted by age by default) and that particular villager is displayed when you are done with this screen.  (This feature is especially helpful when you are trying to sort through 60-70 villagers to find your doctor for example…)   As with real life, you don’t always know what to expect and events sometimes come our way that can benefit us or hurt us.  There are dozens of such events in this game (You will probably have to play it several times to see them all) that can result in everything from gaining tech points, increasing in a tech level of a particular area, loosing some of your food, or even poisoning everyone on the island.  Some of these require some interaction on your part such as deciding to save a whale that has washed up on the beach or to use it for food.  Others, such as a storm striking the island, may be beyond your control hand have disastrous results.   The game has a Preferences Screen that will allow you to turn on or off the sound and music (you have the option of installing up to three different sound files with the game) as well as choosing a difficulty setting and game speed.  Another screen, accessed off the Puzzles menu option, will give you stats for the game including how many real time hours you have spent monitoring your village, births, deaths, etc. One of the things I like best about the developers at LDW is their willingness to listen to their beta testers and customers and implement their ideas into the program.  One such example has to do with saved games.  While beta testing the game prior to its release I awoke one morning to discover that all 61 of my villages had died during the night.  Unfortunately there was no Save Game option in the menu and so I had to start all over.  Upon bringing this to the attention of the developers (they had received the same suggestions from others as well….) they re-designed the game in such a way that the game is stored in a separate file called VillageSavegame.pdb.  Every time you hot sync your PDA a backup is made on your PC. If you are going to be away from your PC for an extended period of time you can always use a file manager program (like the free program Filez) to make a backup copy elsewhere on your memory card During the course of developing and beta testing this game there were more suggestions made as to how to improve the game than you could count.  Fortunately, the guys at LDW are not treating today as the “last day of work” and are working on plans for future releases and possible even a sequal.  Upcoming features may include some of the following features:·  A full screen version  “Over-the-air transmission” (beamable villagers) A lite version for low-memory devices Village SIM, available from LDW for a very reasonable price of $19.95, requires 3-4 Mb of RAM (depending on how many of the 3 music files you chose to load) and requires a Hi-Res color Palm with OS 5.0 or higher.  Conclusion:  I have to admit that I have never been a fan of SIM type games in the past and yet this one really captured my heart.  This is easily the most astounding SIM game ever created for the Palm PDA and is the most addictive game that I have played in all my years beta testing and reviewing PDA software.  I love that you can play the game in real time and found myself anxious to grab my PDA in the morning to discover how everyone had fared or if any events had occurred while I slept.  I find it so hard to believe that one 3.6 Mb program can not only contain the graphics for the program but also monitor the actions of 70+ villagers as they go throughout their day.  My hat is off to the developers at LDW for what I am sure will be an award winning game in 2005.