![\"simcity\"](\"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/simcity.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOne of the things I find most interesting about SC4 is the extent to which it is sandbox and freeform driven. The player is given a toolkit for city building and left to get on with it. It really is a (pleasant) throwback to ‘make your own fun’ which I find thoroughly refreshing after playing so many modern games, which amount to a checklist of ordered tasks, and a booming voice saying ‘hit this key’ ‘now hit that key’ ‘well done, have 1,000 gold stars for hitting the key we just told you to hit’.<\/p>\n
I hate that.<\/p>\n
Sim City 4 has no achievements or high scores, or todo lists or much in the way of targets or quests, and I find myself remarkably capable of setting my own. My first city has floundered a bit financially due to my insistence on building an entire metropolis powered by wind turbines. (Annoyingly there are no economies of scale with them :(). My second city is achieving an almost OCD level of sadness with it’s ordered grid system and widespread use of monorails. I didn’t need a ‘wind energy badge’ or a ‘monorail achievement’ to encourage me to play or have fun in this way.<\/p>\n
It’s also helping me to understand how some players get REALLY into optimizing their fleets and ship designs in Gratuitous Space Battles<\/a>. You have no idea how much bulldozing and re-designing I’ve carried out to get the optimum layout for my monorail system :D<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve got totally addicted to Sim City 4. The new version will have to be something very special to make me prefer it to this classic. I enjoyed it thoroughly upon release, but have recently rediscovered it’s charms. Weirdly, it’s performance on my PC is not great. I strongly suspect that this is because it<\/p>\n