SimCity Societies: For the OCD Urban Planner in All of Us
October 26th, 2007, 6 Comments »
Back when I was a teenager and on computers #1 through 3, I became obsessed with SimCity, SimEarth and sundry other SimUlations. I remember them as engrossing games that pleased my mother. For a change, no one died. The Sim games also had this highly subversive educational element, but the teaching never got in the way of the urban planning fun.
The latest installment in the SimX line is SimCity Societies (found via Marketing Green), which looks pretty extraordinary. From the game’s website:
Featuring an all-new, revolutionary feature set, SimCity Societies allows you to create your own kinds of cities and shape their cultures and environments. Make your cities green or polluted, contemporary or futuristic, rural or urban. Create an artistic society or a police state, an industrial city or a spiritual community—or any society you want!
Whew, the language on that site could use an overhaul. I’m pretty sure that most SimCity players don’t think in terms of ‘feature sets’.
Be sure to check out the producer’s walkthrough video–it offers a glimpse of how layered this game seems to be. The thumbnail shows a screenshot of the game, with an inset from the original SimCity (courtesy of Wikipedia) for the Atari ST.