Will Wright, how you continue to vex me.
So the other day I was bit by the nostalgia bug, and I looked up a version of the original SimCity. It's really faithful port, although it's missing the really useful crime and pollution indicators (unless I'm seriously missing something). But I forgot just how weird the game mechanics are and how hard it is.
Case in point - I was getting bored with a city I was building, since its population just seemed to stagnate around 25,000 people. So just for laughs, I decided to use just about my only means for wrecking the city, which was to completely cut funding for transportation. (This was also nice because I was really low on money too.) Within a few "months", my roads had deteriorated to the point that automobile traffic was essentially crippled, and the train had become entirely useless as well. But the funny part was, for one month, my population actually increased to over 36,000 people! I quickly restored funding and patched the roads, and sure enough, the population went back to its usual level. Now, I'm sure the traffic was too high originally, and destroying all the roads was an unorthodox way of resolving that problem. I also bet that gas prices dropped like a rock because of all the unused supply. But were these issues so great that almost ten thousand people decided "Hey, the roads are so bad here that they resemble the surface of the moon, let's move in!"? Maybe we should try this in real life - demolish the streets of some stagnating town or city (I nominate Detroit) and watch people flow in!
And all this and I'm still excited about Spore.
Case in point - I was getting bored with a city I was building, since its population just seemed to stagnate around 25,000 people. So just for laughs, I decided to use just about my only means for wrecking the city, which was to completely cut funding for transportation. (This was also nice because I was really low on money too.) Within a few "months", my roads had deteriorated to the point that automobile traffic was essentially crippled, and the train had become entirely useless as well. But the funny part was, for one month, my population actually increased to over 36,000 people! I quickly restored funding and patched the roads, and sure enough, the population went back to its usual level. Now, I'm sure the traffic was too high originally, and destroying all the roads was an unorthodox way of resolving that problem. I also bet that gas prices dropped like a rock because of all the unused supply. But were these issues so great that almost ten thousand people decided "Hey, the roads are so bad here that they resemble the surface of the moon, let's move in!"? Maybe we should try this in real life - demolish the streets of some stagnating town or city (I nominate Detroit) and watch people flow in!
And all this and I'm still excited about Spore.