SimCity

Posted by tomo at 01:12 PM in games , urban . | 4 Comments

The UK has a new weapon to fight flooding, a 3D SimCity-like video game called FloodRanger which allows players to budget and plan for jobs, housing, infrastructure, and, of course, flooding. The player can build dams or reservoirs but must keep in mind the effects on public opinion. The hope is that ideas can be tested out in this virtual world before trying them out for real. The developers tried to make the modeling as accurate as possible, but it may therefore be a bit dry as a game for kids and I'm not sure it'll end up on toy store shelves.

This week is National Engineers Week and Maxis, the maker of the SimCity series, is donating a copy of SimCity 3000 to be used in the National Future City Competition where 7th and 8th graders are challenged to think about and design working future cities. Some teams will be focusing on Martian cities this year and while students will be creatively thinking about problems that will face future Martian citizens, I think the game lacks controls for certain problems that near-future cities are facing, namely out-dated zoning code, NIMBYism, big box developers and other causes of sprawl. Perhaps not appropriate for all ages, but adding in social features like gentrification, racial segregation, and affordable and subsidized housing could make it a more useful tool to real city mayors.

For those who just want to play, there's now a way to play a SimCity-like game within the game The Sims. The plugin is called Slice City and although not made by the maker of The Sims and SimCity, they decided to showcase it on their site. Soon we will realize we are just sims within a sim city playing The Sims simulating sim cities by a sim within a...

Anyways, if you just want to play the original SimCity, you can now do so for free within your browser at simcity.ea.com.