SimCity is the best game ever.

My SimCity Regions
Angel Coast

No, really. It’s true. It is the only game I have found that is never the same experience twice. No matter what version of the game you are playing (besides SimCity Societies, more on that below), the interface and tools are the same, but the result… well, that’s art.

SimCity allows you to take a barren piece of land and mold it into whatever you want. Farm Town? Okay. Megalopolis? Yep, you can do that too. With SimCity 4′s region concept, you can create a huge metropolitan area, or 478 agricultural townships – or anything in between.

My Building Philosophy

My philosophy on building is this: make the city functionally realistic in it’s visible infrastructure. What this means is, build a network of winding country roads and rail lines connecting several small towns, making sure to properly follow terrain (trains and trucks cannot climb huge inclines, go up them mountains sideways! Follow creek beds!) Then, build those towns out. Start with some static grids at the center, then as you wind farther out, go to suburban sprawl. This makes the transportation grid seem like it evolved naturally and wasn’t designed purposely.

As I said above, I focus on functional realism, but not aesthetic realism. In order to get asthetic realism, you have to seriously compromise on the functionality and makes the city seem planned or “painted”. That’s just something that doesn’t interest me.

Plugins I use for SimCity 4

• Rush Hour Expansion Pack
• Network Addon Mod (ESSENTIAL!)
• Hole Digging Lots
• Bridge Height Mod
• Diagonal Jagged Edges Mod
• Realistic Water Mod
• Road Top Mass Transit Mod
• Transportation Map Mod or Edmonton Transportation Map Mod

SimCity Societies: The Red-headed Sim Stepchild

What happens when you farm out a company other than Maxis to build SimCity with the instructions, “Make SimCity more like The Sims so it will sell more copies”? You get SimCity Societies.

SimCity Societies is everything SimCity shouldn’t be. SimCity always has been and always should be about the building, growing, and infrastructure of a city. It should never be about the people in the town. When you focus on the people and not the infrastructure, what do you get? You get Zoo Tycoon. Zoo Tycoon is boring. So is SimCity Societies.