There was a black coffee, short-sleeved shirt and tie tone, shared with reference apps like Encarta. James Lovelock even wrote the intro to the SimEarth manual.

Is that kind of thing necessary for a good city builder, though? C:S delivers that by borrowing some of the better ideas from SimCity , and adding some of its own. Each game begins the same way: a blank square of land, connected to the rest of the world via a highway offramp. You may be a mayor, but there are no elections, and your control over the planning system is near-total. Your job is to grow your settlement from a dirt road with farms and bungalows, up into a city of a million citizens, with an airport, mining and farming sectors, cargo port and subway system.

For some, playing this kind of game is a meditative experience. Others will find it deathly dull. Every dog has an owner, and every person waiting at a bus stop is waiting to complete their own unique journey. This is a huge change to how city builders work. Traffic flows like water, and dams in the same way.

Sometimes, with poop. The dynamic water physics are great.

A significant part of the joy of the game is constructing ever-more-efficient traffic intersections. Traffic is the hypnotic core of this game.

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This game is published by Paradox Interactive, whose own games — like superb medieval dynastic struggle strategy game Crusader Kings 2 — not only allow modding, but openly invite it. C:S is no different. This makes it easy to forgive the obvious problems with the basic game, and there are a few. Only a week after release, C:S is already a significantly improved game thanks to its fans.

Consider its approach to corpses. Since the game simulates the lives of every individual citizen, it has to chart out their deaths too. Each hearse carries ten bodies; if they get stuck in traffic, the bodies pile up throughout the city. The deaths come in waves, too, that correlate with the waves of immigration that accompanied the construction of each new neighbourhood in earlier in-game years.

While C:S might very well be the best Maxis-style city builder there is, it seems worth asking whether this is going to be the last, or one of the last, of its kind.

The models that we use to understand things like society exist because trying to account for every single interaction between complicated things like, say, humans, is really hard. Better to invent a model by taking into account a few known things, and tweaking it to make it fit.

Yet give everyone inside a video game a quantifiable life, and you invert the modelling process. This is reflected in the assumptions that have always existed in SimCity titles, and by extension C:S. Government regulation is lax, and devolved to a surprising degree into the hands of you, the mayor. You can even choose to legalise marijuana, if you want. The default tax rate is a laughably low nine per cent, and your city will empty if you approach even half of what would be necessary to fund a modern European welfare state.

There is no history in these games: no street patterns laid down centuries ago that make public transportation and walking necessary defaults; no need to think about architectural or cultural heritage when demolishing something. Does a city builder have to keep going along with those assumptions? Why always playing in the same sandbox? Image: Toho. The processing of recyclable goods seems to be pretty granular—alloys, metals, and plastics are all discrete resources within SimCity's system, and alternatively to just selling them on the market you can keep these materials local for industrial use.

Haber does disclaim that there are some downsides to being a landfill landlord: "Obviously my city becomes very dirty and my Sims aren't very happy, but I don't care because I'm just trying to do it. And I have the advantage that my other cities don't have that stinky garbage dump in their city, they can sort of outsource that service to this other city.

Who is it—I think it's Sweden, they import garbage. Yep, Sweden does.

As do parts of the United States. Haber also mentions a wind energy farm as a type of city he's hoping to experiment with. Please deactivate your ad blocker in order to see our subscription offer. Evan Lahti. See comments.