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Designers

I remember that even as a kid I felt awe towards great designers. My original list included four – Will Wright for SimCity and SimAnt, Peter Molyneux for the Populous games, Chris Roberts for the Wing Commanders and of course Sid Meier. There have been of course additions like Warren Spector and Doug Church (who’s been on the credits of some of the best games ever.) As time has gone by, some designers left gaming for other fields (like Roberts), while others quit design and simply stamped their name on new games (Sid Meier.) Will Wright is one of the few who is profoundly aware of his place in the universe and what makes him happy – and that happens to be game design. So after my first few days of SimCity 4, it was with some relief that I noticed his name was nowhere on the credits.

Ye olde Garbage dump

I love my high-tech industry

Micromanagement - oh boy what fun here

SimCity spawned the original crack jokes about a game’s addictiveness. “Hey John Doe, your eyes are looking a little puffy and red, getting some of that SimCrack in?” It’s the simple gameplay that evolves with layers of hidden complexity that grabs gamers by the family jewels. The games are common sense, but not nitty-gritty. SimCities have rewarded the player for good city design, rather than punishing for a bad one. Make a bad city, and it will be squalid and unpopular, but it will still earn enough money to play.

SimCity 2000 is widely considered the peak of Sim-game design, since it added a little more depth without complicating the game or making it tedious. SC3000 was a slight step backward, forcing the player to take a very active hand in the city. At points, it became work, rather than a game.

SC4

Lately I’ve taken to avoiding previews of titles; I don’t want the game spoiled for me. So when SC4 reached the top of my “to-play” stack, it was with a clear and open mind that I approached it. From the get-go it’s clear that this is a different game which has tried to do very new things. For example, the cities a player deals with are no longer metropolises unto themselves. Rather, the player ends up building one smaller city after another, which then become a metropolis. In the same way that the San Francisco Bay Area is made up of Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley, San Francisco itself and dozens of other smaller towns, so is the city in SimCity 4.

Ritzy

Perfect traffic but...

Why is the average commute 70 minutes?!

As in previous SimCities, the current city can be connected to neighboring ones, but of course now the player has control over those neighbors. At any time he can quit the city screen for the regional one and select the next city he wants to take over or build. The AI which runs the other cities doesn’t actually do much except engage in deals, so in effect it just maintains a sort of status-quo.