SimCity takes some musical inspiration. (All rights reserved - Maxis / EA)
Fancy making a city in the shape of a Gibson SG? Then check out the Ocean's Overview Producer Diary for SimCity to find out why it's an awesome idea for city planners but terrible for citizens.
Turns out that when rush hour is cranked up to 11, commuters have a hard time getting from home to work and back when their main route is the fretboard of a classic axe. Lesson learned.
SimCity producer Ocean Quigley also takes viewers through some of the choices that players will face when commanding a power-intensive conurbation. Will they choose to go green with a wind farm, plunge mine shafts into coal seams, perform dentistry on the earth's crust for oil, or go nuclear without going nuclear? Should spare energy be sold back to the grid or shared with those around? And what about crime -- will clamping down really be as simple as putting more bobbies on the beat?
By the time the unnumbered SimCity rolls around during March's first week, 2013, it will have been ten years since SimCity 4 was first made available.
In the intervening years, Tropico has established itself as a quirky benevolent dictatorship sim with legs, urban construction game City Life became the Cities XL series, and Minecraft encouraged players to get close and personal with their blocky construction projects, while the second project from independent studio Gaslamp Games will be a steampunk-style city builder called Clockwork Empires, also due 2013.
Brandon Ashmore from Mentor, Ohio, got more than he bargained for on Wednesday, when he downloaded Say the Same Thing by Space Inch, a free...
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