Besides building zones, you can build rail lines, seaports, airports, parks, and stadiums to keep your SimCitizens happy and to inject income into the city. You also need to build Police and Fire Departments in strategic areas to deal with crime and to fight fires. You can pull up the Crime and Fire Coverage maps at any time to see if your city is getting sufficient Police or fire coverage, but beware - the more infrastructure you add to your city, the more it costs to support it and the more cash you use building stuff. By default, all funding is set at 100 percent, which is the amount of money it takes to run everything at 100 percent efficiency. When times are lean and you need cash, you can change your budget and decrease the level of committed funds. But if you skimp for too long, your infrastructure starts falling apart, and eventually people start to get pissed off.

Figure A shows that you can check your approval ratings at any time by choosing the "eval" menu and find out what your SimCitizens are kvetching about the most. You can also increase or lower tax rates to generate income or to provide incentives for people and businesses to move in. Balancing all these economic factors in order to keep your city healthy and bustling with people is a constant challenge.

FIGURE A

You can check your approval ratings in SimCity.

SimCity is great on the Palm Platform because you don't have to commit too much time to it if you don't want to. However, you'll probably find yourself compelled to play it whenever you have idle time. You can play with it for a few minutes at a time during coffee and bathroom breaks, waiting for the train, and when you're sitting in some awful meeting that's been going on way too long and you need a distraction. Your current game is always saved, and your city is always there when you come back from doing some other kind of Palm-related activity.

If you've been hankering for a game for your Palm device that is a real challenge, provides good use for those little crannies of dullness during your day, and has infinite possibilities, SimCity is the game for you.

Claire Pieterek is a long-time Palm handheld user. On a mission to ditch her Franklin Planner, she bought her first--a Pilot 5000--in May, 1996. She currently owns a Japanese-language Sony Clie 650C, a Sony Clie 710C, and a Palm Zire 71, among others. She is most at home in Chicago and Kyoto, and is a student of life, the universe, and Japanese.