The past five days since the last entry in have been an uncomfortably number of hours spent on SimCity. The addiction I've been coming to grips with is if something that, if it had continued for long enough, would have probably left me at the centre of a large circle of friends and family concerned about my well being. It's the most fun I've had playing a video game in a while, and man, I was getting good. My cities flourished. I was rich beyond reason. I had the wealth of Mr. Burns but with the heart of post-lesson-learned-Grinch. Then, in amidst all of the addiction that unheralded joy that the game brought me, something clicked. I closed out of the game and I sincerely doubt I'll return for months, or years, or ever, quite frankly.
Upon realizing that Gopher Heap was a colossal failure of a town, I sought out a new region and began anew, in the fittingly named city of "Redemption." It was stripped of all the things that made Gopher Heap fail - reckless spending, poor city planning, and a deep-seated hatred of my own citizens. I was patient, careful not to overextend, and decided on such brilliant maneuvers as placing the dump a sizeable distance away from both my water supply and my residential segments. For one reason or another, the populace seemed to agree that a one minute trip to the dump was a small price to pay for a town that didn't literally smell like crap.
I was making, as the younger civilians in the town called it, fat stacks. But my people were uneducated, and due to the woefully tiny map sizes, I was forced to move to greener pastures - more-so just to give something new a shot. And that is when the game both got exceptionally exciting and very frustrating.
I made a number of cities of various success, and it really came down to one major factor; if I did horrible things to mother nature and kept my population at an elementary school learning level, I would be making a lot of money. Education is expensive, and digging up the right rocks sells for a heck of a lot. So I would make mining community after mining community, all of which were making millions in incredible speeds, but every time I tried something else they would fall flat on their face. A tourist city I made used the resources stripped from the ground to pay for the tourism buildings, which, while mildly successful, did little more than pay for themselves. A city built on education and high wealth residential could hardly get itself out of the red, proving that in both real life and SimCity, a university degree means you'll make less than the guy on the rigs, but will give you a false sense of superiority. Trying to make a manufacturing city, taking those resources and making them into something, meant that I ran out of space so quickly after using supplemental income from successful mining towns that I had the entire map filled literally before I let people move in. It was in creating the final town that I decided to call it quits - I felt like I had done everything there was to do (which, I'll admit, was a lot) and until they make a larger map size in order to actually trade resources between the towns effectively and let me try something more than just repeatedly drilling into the Earth's face, I simply wasn't interested anymore.
So sorry, Jack Maximum, I won't be able to find the right town for you. Turns out you'll just have to burn all your books and become a rigger. That might not be all that bad, but that was when I discovered Origin (the conglomerate that gave me The Sims 2 for free some time after purchasing SimCity) upgraded The Sims to something I no longer understand, deleting Jack Maximum in the process somehow. So somewhere, buried with universities and tourist attractions that provide no income, lies Jack.
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