Window Washer's Dream

NYEastRiver_From_WTC, Fanghong, 1992

At the end of the 90s I was getting a bit old for Lego. There's an old camcorder tape somewhere from the early 90s of me giving a tour of my attic-based sprawling Lego city. When I moved out of my old house in July 2000 the Lego was packed away and it's still in boxes in the basement because this house is substantially smaller. A few months prior to moving, a friend had given me an old copy of SimCity 2000. Along with Pokémon Red/Blue, it was the cause of my first exile from television - even from then-still-good The Simpsons. By my first exams in May 2002 I had a copy of SimCity 3000. I would get up early and play it all day, which in hindsight could have been used for studying but I coasted that year's exams anyway.

Despite all that gaming time, I was only ever able to play from a preloaded city. I was never able to create a city from scratch - I was usually bankrupt by the end of January 1900. A few years back I bought SimCity 4 with the intention of actually creating my own city for once, not just reshape a pre-existing one. I hadn't bet on SC4 being as technical as it was. So two years ago I went back and bought SimCity 3000 Unlimited. Just as Keen Dreams looks piss easy all these years later, I started a new game and suddenly found I was winning, if you can call it that. This took me by surprise and I forgot to create save points so I could look back at the city's growth - I only remembered two weeks later when the calendar hit 2038.

Instalments of the SimCity series have famously been used by real-life city planners as test beds. One of the great things about the game are the problems you encounter, for I love nothing better than problem solving. My transport system, for instance, is heavily indebted to setups found in reality.

In trying to find the best layout for the city centre's subway I looked at the simple circle of Glasgow, and the distinctive triangular arrangement of the various Soviet-built metros (difficult to implement because of the game's distaste for diagonal lines). In addition to the subway, there is a partially underground railway running through the outer suburbs. The cuttings and tunnels of that are inspired by the rail around my local train station and sections of the North Clyde line - this also keeps road and rail grade separated. The freeways now also follow the tunneling method, though the redevelopment of the city centre route caused the population to fall by around 200,000.

The airport is one of a number of artificial islands, primarily because of the immense air pollution emanating from it. It's the only caveat to the no-cheats rule as I had to use the building-plop cheat to build the terminals because the game just creates a visual mess if you let it do it. On consideration, the transport links are pretty poor without highway access (road bridge and subway only), but building another highway branch would force the demolition and reconstruction of dense residential zones. Poor transportation is one of two reasons why I built the new seaport next to the airport. The second is that extensive land reclamation in the central business district (CBD) has substantially narrowed the river upstream when the large seaport was located in the northern industrial zone. The extension on the right bank was an island until the channel was filled in a decade ago - the river now has a bizarre hour-glass figure.

In trying to stay true to life, I've refrained from the grid pattern in the suburbs and used curves and culs-de-sac. Even though SC3K is strictly grid-based and this results in wasted tiles, it's easier on the eye. The only exception to this are the old mansions in the Southern corner of the screenshot, which are another local inspiration from this part of town.

The most annoying problems by far are those caused by landfills (well, that and the radiation area in the eastern corner). I thought I learned my lesson when the old landfill hampered encroaching development over a hundred years ago. As the ground on the right of the river was then largely undeveloped, I built a new landfill between what are now intersections by the smaller industrial area. Predictably, the city grew straight up to it and it's now preventing industrial expansion. After sixty years, there's thankfully only a few tiles left to decompose. Until then, the Sector south of the farms will remain forested. Perhaps a good thing - residential development there would cause the centre of the city to shift northward and drop land prices in the current CBD, ruining all my lovely skyscrapers.

Whenever I come up with some names for the various districts I'll give a tour.

Orpstal as it stands on January 1st 2140 [Picture link - 1.3MB]

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