The botched launch of SimCity

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Guiding a city through the first few hours of its life as its all-seeing despotic demigod mayor starts out as delightfully creative and empowering. This "simulation," by the way, is a very gamey one. In a break from reality, it has no concepts of private property or democracy, and no checks on your power, so the world is your oyster. If anyone were to tell you differently, you could bulldoze their house to the ground and replace it with a sewage outlet, consequence-free. (Alas, they don't.)I've heard real power defined as control over other people; surely dominion over virtual masses is the next best thing. SimCity's citizens are simple-minded folk, but their sheer quantity makes the technical feat of keeping track of each one's name, home address, work address, happiness level, education level, wants, fears, and around a dozen other stats absolutely astonishing. [Edit: seems I was mistaken here – sims don't actually remember where they live or work, and Maxis may've never claimed they did. The guys I followed must've just been close enough to fool me.] I've had single cities with populations numbering over 150,000, and though there have been several catastrophic behavioral errors that have brought entire cities to their knees, zooming in to watch these swarms of ant-like people go about their days – and then manipulating them by changing their environment – is endlessly fascinating.Such absolute power, even if it is absolute power on a literal budget derived from tax income and the sale of natural resources, is always a joy to play and experiment with. In no small part, that's due to an excellent, cleanly designed interface and powerful, user-friendly tools for laying down roads, zones, and buildings. The UI is so polished that the glitchiness of the road tools when fine-tuning exactly where you want them to go comes as a big, unwelcome surprise, as does a fundamental issue with the way roads are upgraded.You see, you can only build a structure if it's directly attached to a road, and when you do, the building is bound to the road for life. If the road goes, so does the building. That means that if you've built a pricy hospital or power plant on a small two-lane street (which is mostly what you can afford early on) and you want to upgrade to a four-lane avenue because of crippling traffic... well, kiss that expensive piece of government property goodbye. That design flaw can be a real kick in the wallet if you're not very, very careful.The next unhappy surprise happened when I hit the invisible walls of my city's borders. This is usually right when I feel like I'm picking up steam and finally raking in enough funds to buy some big fancy stuff (like a sports stadium or a nuclear power plant) and suddenly realize I have nowhere left to place it. Maxis calls the game engine that powers SimCity GlassBox, and that name takes on new meaning when the claustrophobia of its tiny transparent borders sets in. Increasing population density is the only means of growth then, and that requires going back and bulldozing some of those roads.Why not just play on a larger map, then? Because there aren't any. Every single one of SimCity's dozens of pre-made, non-modifyable maps is exactly the same size, which means their usable space goes from small to smaller when unusable geography like hills and water get in the way. Cramming efficient cities into those spaces isn't without appeal, but the lack of freeform play makes it a less interesting proposition.This is where Maxis' grand (but currently unsuccessful) plan to adapt what has historically been a single-player experience into an online and social one comes in. Every city is just one part of a larger region (premade and uneditable, of course) of between two to 16 city lots, which can each be inhabited by a player, or they can all be claimed by a single player and played solo. When the stars align, adjoining cities can share utilities like power, water, and sewage treatment, as well as services like police, fire protection, and garbage collection. Citizens can even commute back and forth for work and tourism. It's actually a good idea for multiplayer citybuilding; the problem being it simply doesn't work very well.On the rare occasions it's functioned properly for me, it has successfully mitigated some of the issues of small cities by allowing me to forego building structures like power plants and police stations in a new city I start next to an established one. That also has the advantage of allowing me to change up my typical build order and get more creative with my design and hyper-specialize a city for one task, like educating both my own citizens and those of the cities around me.But like I said, it's highly unreliable. Even when two adjacent players are online at the same time and chatting over Origin's IM (because the region chat doesn't currently work), the information on what services a neighboring town is offering updates so slowly – I'm talking hours here – that most of the time I threw up my hands and just built the extra water tower for myself instead of waiting for it. I appreciate the flexibility of being able to control my own region as totally as I do my own city, but even two cities I built myself have the same sharing problems.The idea of a collaborative citybuilder wasn't a crazy one, but the approach Maxis took of forcing us to play in a way we don't necessarily want to is among the worst mistakes a game designer can make. A great design convinces or manipulates us into wanting to do something we wouldn't have done naturally, but SimCity simply ham-fistedly shoves city-building fans into an online multiplayer environment. It's having a hell of a time making the metaphorical horse drink that metaphorical water.Sadly, the always-online requirement has inflicted another casualty, a feature that's beloved by many classic SimCity fans. Because your cities are persistent and stored in the cloud, you can no longer roll them back to a previously saved version. That greatly reduces the fun of manually unleashing disasters like tornadoes, asteroids, monsters, and even zombie outbreaks on your city in guilt-free "What if?" scenarios. Sure, most buildings are replaced at no cost to you, but if something you've placed is hit – like a nuclear power plant, if you're really unlucky – you're out more than $100,000... and now your city is irradiated. Depending on how far along you are and what industries you have, that can represent quite a bit of play time lost. Disasters are now actually scary, and not the fun toys they are in offline SimCitys.Then there's the economy. In addition to the traditional tax sliders, you can earn money by completing entirely optional missions. I quite enjoy the concept of the guy who wants to put on a fireworks display, who basically pays you $50,000 for the privilege of setting numerous small fires around your city, even though he pops up far too regularly. Then the other way of earning cash makes all of that almost completely irrelevant.City specializations let you exploit the randomly distributed finite natural resources found in most maps, or, bugs permitting, set up a bustling tourist trade. (Bugs, to date, have not permitted me to do that successfully.) I've had a great deal of success digging up ore, coal, and oil and selling it on the global market, to the point where I generally just turn taxes off altogether and fund my city off of this strange socialist enterprise. I made even more money by refining those goods and selling alloy and plastic, and even more with computer chips and TVs. Thus, SimCity basically became a business simulator rather than a city simulator. (On top of it all, making money off of selling commodities renders the income indicator on the main UI completely inaccurate. It can't account for income made by trucks carrying goods because they might get stuck in traffic.) Maybe this doesn't weird non-Americans out, but I find it odd for a mayor to be acting more like a CEO.But ignoring civics is sometimes a welcome break from a job made trickier by SimCity's terrible habit of casually lying to us about what our citizens want. It says they almost always want more residential zones, even during an unemployment crisis – and almost never commercial zones, even as individual residential buildings report a lack of good places to shop. They complain about germs despite massive health coverage. They panic that the sewage pipes are backed up when there's tons of extra capacity. Mobs are perpetually protesting at city hall, disregarding almost 90% approval ratings. High-tech businesses close for lack of educated workers while seats in well-equipped schools remain empty and unemployed citizens watch TV all day. The tourism industry, as I mentioned, is flat-out broken and will from time to time cause once-profitable casinos and landmarks to simply turn into costly ghost towns overnight.There are bugs beyond count, though it's difficult to determine which are actually bugs and which are things that just haven't been explained by the short tutorial and vague in-game guides. Using trade, for example, took some figuring out. I'm sure this'll be made easier as online wikis are filled in, so you'll likely have a better experience than I did there. There's a lot of stuff going on in SimCity – any fears of Maxis selling us a content-light game to starve us into buying DLC can be put to rest, at least.As it stands, then, SimCity is only partly functional. What works – mostly – is a single-player city builder limited by confining city sizes. I am deeply disappointed by the state SimCity has arrived in, because there's already so much about it I like and so much more potential seemingly within its grasp, yet I'm prevented from really loving it. Particularly while the fastest time-acceleration speed remains disabled (as it is at the time of this review), as being unable to skip past the in-game hours yof waiting for the cash to roll in makes for an excellent opportunity to open a browser window and read some of those wikis.It sounds bad when I put it that way, but on the other hand I've played for dozens of hours, often into the early hours of the morning, and I don't regret them. The sense of pride and ownership I have in my cities is reward enough, and I've spent plenty of time just zooming in and panning around for a kind of virtual tourism, wishing there were an option to explore on foot. Even hovering above ground level, looking up at a skyscraper and seeing each individual window is a thing of beauty. And I have to say, since I've been playing, driving toward the skyscrapers on the downtown San Francisco skyline on the way to work every morning has become an eerie, deja vu-like experience.