Mistakes Were Made

Bought Sim City 4 last night, but was busy doing this and that and couldn't start playing until around midnight. Next thing I knew it was 4:00 AM and now I'm very tired.

Impact on sleep aside, from an urban policy perspective, the game has several flaws and one hopes Sim City 5 will allow for mixed-use buildings (apartments with ground floor retail, etc.) and take some account of bicycling as a possible mode of transportation. At the same time, the game is curiously optimistic about middle class people's willingness to ride a bus to a subway station then take a subway then get on another bus and take that to work. Maybe when gas costs $20 a gallon, but in the real world I think people who aren't in desperate financial straights are only going to use transit if it's reasonably convenient.

Comments

MattY, you were ALMOST there, until you got to "financial 'straights.'" It's "straits." Cripes. Almost, but not quite as bad as Ezra's recent use of "Wherefore..?" to mean "where..?" instead of "why...?"

Posted by Tyro | May 14, 2008 12:55 PM

This is again part of why bus rapid transit can make a lot of sense in certain applications. Turn that subway leg into a dedicated busway, and people can board one bus that actually follows that entire route, eliminating those two transfers.

Posted by DTM | May 14, 2008 12:57 PM

There are a few other flaws as well. The most noticeable is the way that pathfinding works for motorists. They'll use the geographically shortest route every time, even when a slight detour could let them access a highway that would get them to their destination twice as fast. You'll learn to sort of force your sims into traveling on your major roads, or else you'll find highways to be useless money sinks.

I do believe there are mods for the program that adjust the pathfinding, but my understanding is that they're resource hogs. So its up to you if you want to use them.

The game will adequately reward things like corner markets in residential neighborhoods, but if you're not careful, those corner markets will improve in property value and end up replaced by office buildings. If you want to retain the corner market, set it as a historical building. This applies to a lot of things in the game, particularly low income apartment complexes. A large, well located low income apartment can supply labor to a lot of important buildings, but it will inevitably get replaced by the middle or upper class unless government action preserves it.

Posted by Patrick | May 14, 2008 12:58 PM

This has been one of my crazy-person rants for years...the somewhat blatant America post-1950 assumptions built into the algorithms of SimCity since the start. I remember with the first SimCity, you could buy add ones to turn your cities into mediaeval or ancient cities...with single use zoning. Madness, but at least the early tech could excuse it. Since SimCity 2000 there's been little excuse. SimCity 4 is still like crack to me, though.

The bad news is that there will apparently not be further SimCities with additional complexity, as the powers-that-be presently think that 4 was already too complex and unwieldy.

BTW, anyone else been wishing for a SimTower 2000 for the past decade?

Posted by ERM | May 14, 2008 1:00 PM

Sim city has never allowed for mixed use zoning. Too bad. Sim City 4 was ok, but the strategy for making money in the city was tiresome, and I gave up.

Posted by freddiemac | May 14, 2008 1:02 PM

When I take the bus to work (75% of the time) I have to hop on a second bus for a 5 minute ride to the office from the main bus drop off (about a mile). It's still quicker than walking from the office to the car. When I take the train and am feeling lazy, I have to take a bus about .75 miles to the train stop, then take another bus .75 miles to the office. Bus commute: 20 minutes. Train commute: 40 minutes. Driving commute: 30 minutes. All of these are door-to-door.

Posted by Joe | May 14, 2008 1:03 PM

So, does the new version incorporate light rail and robot attacks?

Posted by Pierre de Fermat | May 14, 2008 1:04 PM

Bus-subway-bus is inconvenient?

Maybe if you have to wait half a hour between each leg of the trip.

Otherwise, that's the sort of comment that makes the rest of the world hope that economics slap some sense into Americans in the near future. Inconvenient, my ass. Paying thirty thousand dollars plus fuel and maintenance to haul your sorry butt around, that's inconvenient, to the planet.

Posted by sunsin | May 14, 2008 1:05 PM

Agreed with Patrick...judicious use of the Historical designation is vital to maintaining humanely desirable cities.

Posted by ERM | May 14, 2008 1:06 PM

I have noticed that I don't mind riding a bus if it is all on one street, in other words as long as I can get on bus and get it all over with in one shot I am fine with it. When I have to transfer or I start looking for alternative means to get there.

Posted by John Rove | May 14, 2008 1:07 PM

I liked the old Sim City where you could make a city without ever building a road. I just put rail lines everywhere. Really cut down on the pollution. Also, I liked that you could put taxes at zero until the day before tax day, then bump them up to 100%, so you could reap a windfall while still looking like an attractive place to live. I suppose they've probably fixed those glitches.

Posted by Seitz | May 14, 2008 1:08 PM

Hah. Yeah I remember that. I only ever played the first version of SimCity, but the way to go was to simply never build roads. Rail only citys worked fine.

I loved the Godzilla attacks too. Those were fun.

I'm surprised they don't have mixed use zoning by now honestly. I'd like to make a NYC with zero on-the street parking and 4 more subway lines.

Posted by IMU | May 14, 2008 1:17 PM

Matt why are you just picking up SimCity 4 now? It's been out for like three years. (Although I did like the concept of importing your Sim character from The Sims into the game, the reality was it was one too many things to track).

I gave up Sims 2.0 because it got to be too much like real life. SimCity 4 I gave up because I could never solve the transportation problems.

Posted by Newscat | May 14, 2008 1:21 PM

I'm eagerly awaiting the mash-up gameSim City X: Grand Theft Urban where you play a developer whose goal is to create the most unsustainable urban infrastructure possible, while siphoning off as much money as possible to yourself and your buddies. Wort!

Posted by James Gary | May 14, 2008 1:22 PM

Matt, why does it not surprise me that you're playing Sim City 4 rather than Grand Theft Auto 4?

Let loose the id and run some people down, dude. There aren't any bike paths in Liberty City, but the game does have times where the best way to escape from the police after a contract killing is using mass transit. Is that green or what?

Posted by Rid | May 14, 2008 1:23 PM

Matt,

Are you using a Mac to play the game? I have heard there are a ton of glitches that make it frustrating. Is that the case for you?

Posted by Mac | May 14, 2008 1:33 PM

Matt, come over to the Pentagon bus station some rush hour. You will see lots of middle class folks who ride buses to the subway (and back again). You will also see general officers slugging.

Posted by md 20/400 | May 14, 2008 1:33 PM

I gave up on the series after Sim City 1, because I found the developers were starting to add lots of fiddly complexity without adding anything to the realism.

I just want to lay down streets and rail lines, build big important buildings, and set the budget and pass ordnances. As long as I have built the plants and budgeted for maintenance, I don't want to set up individual power and sewage lines, I trust the bureaucracy to do that adequately.

But I would like to have mixed use zoning, or no zoning, or zoning by things like height, appearance, and noise instead of function.

The first version was perfectly playable as a dumb, fun, game where you could build a city then let loose monsters and tornadoes in it.

Also, I'm a Mac user and apparently the later versions don't mix well with Macs.

Posted by Ed | May 14, 2008 1:41 PM

Matt deserves praise for sticking with SimCity 4. Given the announced plans to make future versions more "accessible", more game-y and less intricate simualtions, SimCity 4 may be the highwater mark for the genre.

And there are definitely some mods out there that allow you to create bike paths that let Sims travel further on foot.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | May 14, 2008 1:42 PM

Someone needs to create a more realistic city sim for us civic planning/municipal government nerds.

The central problem with the entire SimCity series is that it pretends to be a city RUNNING simulation, when in reality about 90% of the gameplay is designed around city BUILDING. Needless to say, the problems that managing a city involves are a lot more complex and interesting than those involved in growing a city (which mostly has to do with obtaining as much money as possible). I assume they're also a lot more difficult to program for, but surely in the age of independent games, there's a cadre of municipal government nerds out there who are willing to take up the cause. Right?

Posted by Michael T Sweeney | May 14, 2008 1:59 PM

Count me as another vote for "SimTower 2000" (or whatever Maxis might like to call a new version). That was a game with a lot of potential that was held back by the software/hardware limitations of when it was released, as well as some pretty arbitrary restrictions that prevented logical development of the tower (e.g., you couldn't build "twin towers" with skybridges to help zone the building; express elevators could only be set to travel in increments of 15 floors; the movie theater was unavailable until you got something like a three-star rating for the building, which in practice meant you couldn't get it until you already had a fairly substantial office/residential complex built, etc.).

Posted by Just Dropping By | May 14, 2008 2:03 PM

Definitely go to Simtropolis and download the latest Network Addon Mod (NAM). It adds light-rail functionality and roundabouts, and tweaks the path-finding algorithm.

In fact, you could spend hours scouring the Simtropolis archives looking at the remarkable buildings people have made. The ability to download user-created content is one nice thing about Sim City 4.

Posted by Ernie | May 14, 2008 2:12 PM

If you want a 'spiritual successor' to SimCity 4, I've heard good things about City Life and City XL. The latter is in development and both are made by Monte Cristo, a European Dev. I haven't played it myself, but it seems to try for a more class based system than SC, where the denizens of the city are actually divided into 5 different socio-econo-cultural classes, each with preferences and peeves and like/dislike being around certain classes as well.

Oh yes, and DON'T get SimCity Societies. It blows.

Oh yes, and I always liked creating a low tax, no police, corrupt and burgeoning city. My model was to try to replicate Chinese-style "Big Bang" growth at any cost model. Then as I built a good revenue stream, I'd slowly start focusing on crime, health, and pollution.

Posted by Jack | May 14, 2008 2:15 PM

If you didn't like SimCity Societies, Jack, you'll hate City Life. It's basically the more-primitive forerunner to SCS. I hadn't heard of City XL, will definitely have to look into that one.

Posted by Ernie | May 14, 2008 2:19 PM

I agree with Rid, I haven't played Sim City 4 yet, but I just got GTA IV for XBOX 360 last week and I probably have slept about 12 hours total since!

Posted by Scott | May 14, 2008 2:27 PM

Sim City 5? Goodbye, life.

And yeah, I'd kill for a new SimTower.

Posted by Barbara | May 14, 2008 2:33 PM

I'm eagerly awaiting the mash-up gameSim City X: Grand Theft Urban where you play a developer whose goal is to create the most unsustainable urban infrastructure possible, while siphoning off as much money as possible to yourself and your buddies

That sounds fun.

I’ve been waiting for a game where I can walk around DC. Do stuff like drive your car on the Mall, go to Anacostia and shoot at local gangsters, etc.

I doubt Rock Star will ever accommodate that desire, but I won’t be surprised if it done at a lower level (or has been done already).

Posted by Christopher Colaninno | May 14, 2008 2:36 PM

Granted, I'm old. Nonetheless, I imagine you are all over 21 by a bit. Aren't you embarrassed to play the same game as my teenagers?

Posted by LeeNYC | May 14, 2008 2:41 PM

Sim City 4 & GTA 4? Wow, playing a role in a game against computer generated opponents how exciting. NOT!!

Nothing gets the heart pumping faster than the fun of online killing of fellow Xbox Live gamers in glorious high definition that is provided by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Posted by Chicounsel | May 14, 2008 2:44 PM

"Granted, I'm old. Nonetheless, I imagine you are all over 21 by a bit. Aren't you embarrassed to play the same game as my teenagers?"

I'm 49. No. Why should I be? I've been playing computer games a lot longer than they have.

Posted by Gary Farber | May 14, 2008 2:51 PM

"Nothing gets the heart pumping faster than the fun of online killing of fellow Xbox Live gamers in glorious high definition that is provided by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare."

GTA4 has a bunch of multiplayer modes. Just as competitive as CoD4 with the right settings. Mix cars, guns, and a big open city filled with pedestrians and you can have a lot of fun online.

Posted by Rid | May 14, 2008 3:03 PM

Re: SimTower

SimTower actually isn't a proper Sim games, at least, not in the sense of having been developed by Maxis and created by Will Wright. SimTower was originally a Japanese game, The Tower, developed by Yoot Saito. Maxis just bought the rights, translated it, and rebranded it as a Sim game.

As for a sequel: There already was one. It was called Yoot Tower (easy to miss if you didn't know about the rebranding of SimTower). It was released in 1998 by Sega.

Posted by MoltenBoron | May 14, 2008 3:07 PM

The true secret of SimCity 4 is understanding that the prosperity of your city is directly proportional to how much the city next door sucks.

Posted by Patrick | May 14, 2008 3:26 PM

Love the SimCity series but I've always itched for a good long-term planning function, that lets me virtually lay out my city over the generations so I know exactly what to build where ahead of time. I do a lot of bulldozing as it turns out. Can't wait for Spore, not quite in the same genre though close, but building an entire civilization from multi-cell organism to space-faring planet rapers just sounds awesome!

Posted by tom.a | May 14, 2008 4:59 PM

(a) Gameplay > realism.
(b) Any game other than EVE is for suckers.

Posted by sherifffruitfly | May 14, 2008 5:04 PM

You should've bought Grand Theft Auto IV instead. Hailing a cab is way faster than taking the subway.

Posted by Aatos | May 14, 2008 7:25 PM

A long time back there was actually a SimCity collectible card game, and the objective was actually to make your single-use zones as large as possible. Still fun, but I quickly realized that the objective of the game was to achieve the worst possible plan for your city.

Posted by Adam Villani | May 14, 2008 8:15 PM