A Tale of SimCity: My First Attempt

Thriving, happy cities like these aren't
really my jam. I have a knack for
crippling depression and fire.

After creating my sim through my two blogs of The Sims 2 in which I killed myself before creating the wildly successful military man Jack Maximum, it seemed fitting that I create a city for the guy. Well, at least that's my excuse for wanting to have a run at SimCity, the fifth installment of the series. The game was met with mostly middling reviews due to forced online play, a massive server issue on release (which shouldn't reflect upon the reviews of the game but it inevitably does), and the one major complaint that I feel personally, the map sizes being far too small. The game has since allowed single-player mode, which in turn negates the effects of faulty servers, but haven't changed the map sizes. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful game that doesn't deserve much of the heat that was placed on it.

So here's my story of creating my beautiful, thriving city - a town worthy of one Jack Maximum.

They give you a number of choices on what region to move into, where there are multiple places to found cities that link together with one another. There are options for seaside views, lush, forested lands and whatever the heck an archipelago is. But this is my first city... would it be right to build in the best lands when I myself am not at my best? I've played the game a few times and my cities quickly become cesspools. I even named one city Cesspool, which, while aptly named, lacked tourism for reasons I couldn't understand. So I passed on regions with names like "Serenity Key", "Whitewater Valley", and even "Granite Lake" (the lattermost sounds too confusing for a city - maybe I'll wait when I'm more of an advanced player). I settled on one that I felt would be a greater reflection of my future cities. I picked the only region that made sense.

I settled in "Desolation". 

A dry, barren land that has all the beauty of the Grand Canyon without the vastness or feelings of Americana. Or the beauty, really. It's a pretty rough landscape, but that's not a worry for me. I was renaming "Desolation" anyways, after my home province of Alberta, but adding a regional flair of changing it to 'Berta. Real-life 'Berta is a lovely place, with such gems as the cultural history of the great cocaine rush in Fort McMurray fantastic town names such as Carstairs, Picture Butte, and Vulcan (originally named after the Roman god, but now it's mostly Star Trek stuff). But I had one place in mind that I wished to hold the namesake of my town, and that is Torrington - the home of the famous Gopher Museum I attended earlier that year. Thus, Gopher Heap was born. And Gopher Heap flourished. 

Is this what education gets you? Education has only
provided me with unemployment. And not in SimCity - 
that's why I'm playing SimCity. 

Made into a mining and drilling town, the Heap was surviving off tearing the very heart from mother nature herself and exporting it to the global markets. There were a few minor problems, I'll admit; one single road leading to the sprawling industrial complex was a notable mistake, and traffic problems abounded. Terrible city planning put the sewage system and the dump directly upwind of the city, meaning that Gopher Heap not only looked like garbage, but it smelled that way. It wouldn't be easy to clean, either, seeing as the harsh badlands in which they were settled were low on water. Even electricity was hard to come by; a wind power plant (Gopher Heap goes green!) provided little, and quickly took up way too much space. The only thing that seemed to work was the drilling and mining operation which my poorly educated sims seemed to take to quite well. 

SimCity in 1989. The colour scheme is similar to my
present day Gopher Heap.

It was actually the sims that caused the most amount of problems, if anything. Knowing the city was having difficulty with providing electricity, they still refused to live in darkness. Knowing that water was scarce, they still wished to drink. I couldn't please them. Their businesses kept burning down, so they wanted a fire department. They kept getting murdered, so they needed police. And all the gunshot wounds from the high levels of crime meant that they wished for a hospital, apparently disagreeing with my "survival of the fittest" model in which I had a few citizens die on a daily basis due to injuries or illness. Demands of trash pickup arose as they apparently haven't figured out how to throw garbage in the basement, and sewage was an issue as they haven't discovered corners or a shovel. Worse yet, someone informed them of the notion of education, meaning that they demanded a school. That's where I put my foot down. They would receive an elementary, but no more; no fancy high schools, colleges, academies. They would be just well educated enough to write me angry letters, but they certainly won't be able to write them well. Perhaps if I gave them schools they could solve some of these problems on their own. 

The expenses of such wild notions of having both a hospital and a fire department planted me firmly in the poor house. The people were angry and I was angry with them, so I callously demolished a few homes to induce fear in their omniscient leader. It did little. My town was dying, soon to be covered in dust as everything else was in 'Berta. I called it quits. I'll be ready next time. SimCity won't know what hit it.