SimCity

Who wouldn’t love to be mayor of a city? You would get to virtually play (a fairly limited) god and decide what and where to zone, plan transit systems, balance taxation with spending, provide for public safety, and all of the et cetera that goes along with it.

Limitless fun!

I don’t really know what it is, but taking control of hundreds of invisible simulated people inside your game is oddly compelling. You get to see how your control of your city’s dollars will affect your city’s growth, you gain an appreciation for how complex a web of airports, factories, ports, and residential high-rises all interact to entice people to move to (or from) a city. You also learn how to deal with an attack by a giant rampaging lizard-monster. Protip: get out of the way and build lots of fire departments to assist with the cleanup.

Your goal in this game is pretty much whatever you want it to be. You can try to get the biggest city, the Megalopolis, you can try to make a lot of money by playing the budget, you can experiment with mass transit vs. traditional roads, or you could run the city into the ground, the choice is really yours. Which might be why the game is so compelling. Or boring depending on how much freedom you like in a game.

3 Responses to “SimCity”

  1. [...] game is kind of like a gardening version of SimCity, except instead of millions of Sims, you’re controlling the lives of a few dozen plants at a [...]

  2. [...] only really played the original SimCity game on the Super NES and really liked it. But I kind of forgot about the series for a while until I found a copy on [...]

  3. [...] games in the SimCity series have steadily gotten more and more complicated. I understand it’s because the [...]

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