SimCity

[IamLEAM1983]

If you've been playing with me for a while, you know I love me some micromanagement. I used to be an avid Sims 3 player, up until the point of sheer boredom. I've got the core game, quite a few of the expansions and like any self-respecting and self-loathing EA drone, I have a love-hate relationship with the publisher. They've got talented studios and a great sense of creative direction - if and when the guys from Corporate don't step in - but they're largely inept at handling large clusters of customers in the same way we can manage individual people.

Truth be told, EA sucks at micromanagement.

As for me, though, I used to play SimCity 2000 on the old DOS box my father inherited from his brother, and I spent hours and hours messing around with the first incarnation's Super Nintendo port. I remember buying SimCity 3000 for my father and SimCity 4 for myself when it first came out. Naturally, I was stoked as all Hell when I learned that Maxis was revisiting its city-building pretend-mayor toy for a fifth iteration, the first new one in over ten years.

So how does it fare, exactly? Well enough, truth be told. There's the expected concerns coming with this being an always-online Electronic Arts title, but I can safely say that being hooked to your broadband while playing this won't diminish your experience. Of course, this unfortunately disregards just about anyone without broadband or a quality access. Right off the bat, though, I'll concede that an entirely offline segment would have been greatly appreciated. It's as if having moments of antisocial behaviour were perceived as some sort of disease, to the point where the only way to enjoy what remains a very solitary experience, if you go by EA's new tenets, is with complete strangers. To be perfectly honest, it's a little unnerving. I really don't feel like pushing this out not for the sake of giving my opinion, but to go "Oshit, guys! Buy this game! We'll be in the same regions and build cities together and stuff!". This is clearly what EA is expecting, and something tells me that as with Diablo III's reliance on a persistent server connection, EA is going to realize that a lot of us enjoy playing offline.

So, there. That's the one con to the game: the gaming scene's newfound obsession with Everything Social. Granted, that's a very personal con. If you're a social butterfly - congrats. You'll love the idea of opening up your Region to other players (boy, does this sound wrong or what?) and you'll love seeing how one player developing coal power plants is either giving your coal-producing town a boost in revenue or a massive drop in air quality - depending on whether or not your little burg is downwind from the smoke-belching horror. You'll love the idea of creating dorm towns and casino hubs, and seeing how your focused contribution actually comes to shoulder everyone else's economy.

Naturally, this triggers potential griefing. Prop up a city with a strong industry, wait for your neighbours to start buying your offered goods - and then raze the whole thing to the ground. Muahahahahahaha! Unlike the Minecraft jerks, however, SimCity's trolls will need to be patient. I've played for about five hours straight before XCheeseTaco's Trade Counter began to accept my produced freight in sufficient quantities as to generate useful streams of cash. Pulling the plug is instant, but starting a city or Region with the intent of griefing others doesn't quite feel like the fast and guilt-free fun some cads might be looking for.

Past the hangups with the social aspect of the game, you're looking at a well-oiled machine that wears its name well. The GlassBox engine is designed to not only offer purdy urban vistas wreathed in sunrises or sunsets of particular effect, but also clear visual indicators of your city's overall state. Graffiti start covering the walls of your Low-Wage Commercial strips? That means you have to start putting police stations down in the vicinity. If you're lacking the real estate for this, however, you can always upgrade your basic station into a miniature compound designed to accommodate and dispatch eight squad cars and about a hundred prisoners. Manage things well and you'll eventually earn access to the Prison. The more detailed the buildings, the more high the lot's value. The higher the lot's value, wealthier the residents.

This is all fairly standard fare. Where this changes, however, is in how you don't have access to specific zone densities for each type of lot. You instead "rezone" blocks and streets by upgrading their composition. Budget constraints will see you begin with a network of dirt roads on the ground, but you're free to edit and upgrade each length of road; up to the level of single avenues. Anything more requires a new road being placed from scratch. As such, this creates a realistic and natural interplay between how you create or set up your roads and thoroughfares, and the way the city's landscape changes. A formerly quiet little row of trailer park homes can suddenly burst into high-rise condo towers if you pause the simulation, push your road network to the max in the immediate vicinity and make sure to check for desirability indicators.

What's of particular interest is the way power, water, traffic and waste are all represented throughout the Agent system. Agents aren't so much cars travelling your roads as graphical representations of flowing water, distributed power or building muck that's all flowing underneath your roads. Maxis has finally understood what my real estate appraiser of a father has been telling me for years; which is that the road and pipe networks are one and the same in modern urban planning. Power lines are buried and so are sewage pipes, so there's no real reason for players to actually bother with building a separate network. Of course, this removes high-tension cables and first-degree power-channelling utilities from the game, seeing as making sure your new metropolis has juice is as simple as sticking your power plant next to a road. It's easy and it makes perfect sense.

Your urban planning duties are also similarly simplified. You no longer need to paint quads with the zoning tool of your choice, as Sims will build only along the peripheral roads. No more ending up with automatically created lots that aren't connected to anything. No more accidentally fucking up your desirability index for a sector because the game made a derp and figured that lots could be paired off in fairly unrealistic and absurd ways. If a business needs more space or your efforts to raise the density level of an area are fruitful, you'll see stores reach deeper inside the lot.

Similarly, the new SimCity isn't really concerned with building gigantic metropolises that cater to everyone's every single need. Cities are a lot smaller this time around, this further emphasizing the need to either play with others or plan your private Regions accordingly (they really could have thought of a better name, honestly). The fun part is in structuring your Region so you can pool all of your resources together and complete what the game calls a Great Work. You could compare those to Civilization V's victory-granting Wonders, in that they're at the very end of your cities' specialization tracks. A Region that's strongly focused on Tourism will be able to develop a natural park to its fullest extent. A Region that specializes in high-tech jobs will get the chance to build a shuttle's launch pad. A virtual Las Vegas, on the other hand, can focus on trying to develop its local Great Work into the casino to end all casinos.

While everything works as advertised, some mechanics obviously weren't stress-tested. For instance, you're free to combine various city specializations, with each of them having at least one building to "Plop" down that's more or less guaranteed to bring in a torrential amount of cash. Get two Gambling Houses and one Coal Mine going in a single city, and you'll laugh your way to the bank within the following ten minutes. This informs a particularly cheap tactic, which consists of making a fairly simple town that's equipped with the above amenities, fast-forwarding until their income outweighs their expenditures, and then working exclusively on other cities in the same Region. The loaded burg then becomes the financial wet-nurse for the other local tycoons, who become more or less free to splurge their hearts out.

If all players in the same Region follow the same tactic, or if you lock yourself into private play and follow that tactic across all your cities, you'll be drowning in Simoleons within a few real-time hours. And some players have the nerve to complain that the game doesn't allow cheats...

Of course, the fact is that it does, but in the form of a gameplay segue. Tick "Sandbox Mode" when creating your new Region, and money ceases to be an object. All Ploppable objects become available, all road types are free - this is perfect if you're looking for an excuse to play the way most of us did SimCity 4 - with cheats on.

On the flipside, the new title also offers a fair challenge. One city's poor financial decisions will affect you, while another one's shining example of management will reflect well on the one you're currently playing. As such, taxes are a lot more dynamic than in previous games. They're not any more complex or granular (they aren't, actually, considering you start out being unable to tweak tax rates) and only start out with a flat rate for everyone, but one ill-informed policy shift can take a ledger book that's fat and in the black and turn it thin and blood-red within two seconds flat. This increased sensitivity comes at a price, however. You'll find yourself maxing out tax rates in all three sectors very, very quickly. Do this right, and your Sims will react the way frogs do when immersed in gently and increasingly heated water.

That is, they won't react at all. With the game working on a micro-scale, compared to SimCity 4's macro-scale, you reach what most veteran SC players might recognize as your typical endgame scenario in mere hours. Your taxes are all jacked up and nobody's complaining, because you've successfully driven your Low Wealth Residential types out of house and home.

Give it time, and every city in any variation of this game starts to look the same: an oasis for posh people and towering, erm, towers. Unless you purposefully try out weird social models and don't play to actually "win" (fingerquotes because you can't actually win SimCity). Or unless you're a sadistic motherfucker like me, and like triggering zombie invasion after zombie invasion. This wouldn't be a Maxis game without zombies or vampires, after all.

All things considered, this is a great game and a fantastic re-envisioning of the venerable franchise. Its new focus on the nitty-gritty and its lack of credit given to the ages-old megalopolis models forces you to look at more than just your RCI indicators, and invests you with what's happening around town, at street-level. The design tools are powerful and flexible, but I'd mention the slight disappointment I felt in seeing that none of the Regions had directly editable terrain. The previous game's God mode was a real joy to have, and I'll miss being able to create my own mountain ranges.

If you pick this up, let me know. Seeing you in my Regions might be fun. That is - I mean -

Goddamn, didn't anyone put this whole Region thing through an innuendo checker?!

[IamLEAM1983]

2:51 AM, Day 2: the cracks are beginning to show.

Miraculously, the game seems to have weathered through its preload sequence and the first twelve hours of its legitimate existence without a hitch on my end of the continent. Past that, however? Eeeeeeh.

I've been going through numerous and almost precisely measurable crashes, and as I expected, the game can't handle someone who jumps into new games the way I do. Being a bit of an "altaholic" - someone who replays the same sequence of a game over and over for the sake of getting it right, goddamnit - I must have started and abandoned a dozen cities by now. Seeing as the only local elements of the simulation consist of what's part of the City View, regional data is kept online at all times. Considering, flagging a Region for deletion probably takes a few good minutes. In any case, this means you have some likelihood of being stuck with a filled set of Regions, even if you've been intending to empty it. I've closed the game entirely several times, only to end up staring at the same old list of defunct Regions I've been wanting to get rid of.

It's also a little more crash-prone than earlier. Give it half an hour and the game almost is assured to boot you out without any preamble.

"SimCity.exe has stopped responding"

You don't say.

What seemed to be a case of proper Day One management has also been soured a bit, as queues and wait times have surfaced on North American servers. As a rule, if the game tells you you'd better twiddle your thumbs for fifteen minutes, you're better off making it half an hour and finding something else to do.

It's still mechanically sound - when it runs - and when it doesn't throw inexplicable tax nosedives your way, or coal delivery trucks who implausibly stop in their tracks. While my initial games allowed me to reach that boringly perfect state of excellence I talked about earlier, my later cities showed me the dark twin of the very same phenom: unplanned fiscal clusterfucks.

You'll be raking in twenty thousand Simoleons per hour one minute and then - bam. Complete fucking indigence, as your projected revenue turns into a projected loss and ends up performing a suplex-piledriver combo on your approval rating.

So - yeah. There's a few bugs.

I'd give it a few days. Or maybe a month. You know EA.

[IamLEAM1983]

So, um...

SimCity's going offline. After exactly one year of "Nope, no, can't do it. Nada, negatory, everything's up in the cloooooud!", Maxis finally came around, realized its entire user base was pissed off, probably made borderline Satanic appeals to their lords and masters at Electronic Arts - and realized they'd have to re-code everything in C++ so it runs natively.

'Cause, y'know, let's code a triple-A release with a hugely massive fan base in Java. Minecraft has an excuse, SimCity does not. This comes with the announcement that SimCity will also be mod-friendly in the coming updates, although only mod-friendly as long as texture updates are considered. Boo! Let the fans fix your broken traffic management algos, Maxis!

Ten to one that we end up with a skyscraper texture that makes high-rises look like phallic symbols. Because Internet. Looking at what happened to Lucy Bradshaw in the fallout of this debacle, I'm reminded of something Kevin Smith said about "failing upwards" in your career... She went from Project Leader at Maxis to becoming one of EA's VPs in a year.