Wake Up The City

Lego Chicago City View 2001, Otto Normalverbraucher, 2005

Like the photograph to the left, I had a large Lego city that eventually had to be packed away. Next week is thirteen years since it was boxed up when I moved out of my old house, and to date it's still in the basement buried under even more boxes of unpacked stuff. The thing about Lego is it takes up space. In my old room at the end of the 90s it was all set up on two spare paint tables - there isn't even room for half a table now. In a way Lego followed Scalectrix and Subbuteo in being replaced by digital products that could better emulate reality and required nothing more than a computer and a compact disc. In all the years I've missed building with Lego, SimCity has provided a constructive outlet.

New Terrain

SimCity (2013), Electronic Arts promotional screenshot

After ten years there's a new SimCity out (Societies doesn't count), but this is not an outright review of that game. At the start of March my internet connection died for several prolonged hours. After repeatedly trying to view several websites out of habit before realising they'd never load, I looked for something else to do. I hadn't played SimCity 3000 in nearly two years so I fired that up. What a good thing it is that always-online DRM hadn't been invented in 1999 because I would have been screwed as the new game even saves your cities in "the cloud". Since I last seriously played it, my city was populated by over a million sims and it had expanded almost to the limits without becoming one of those highly efficient cities designed by a player who has brutally calculated the placement of every building. My ideas about what a large city should look like are still firmly rooted in the skyline of Manhattan, hence I've kept the default building style in SC3K Unlimited. Only recently has London started racing for the clouds.

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.