Whoops!

I was cautiously looking forward to the new SimCity game.  Sure, the always-online requirement was troubling, especially for a game series that’s been single player for 25 years, and most of the previews complained about the small city size, but really, how can you screw up SimCity?  
 

As it turns out, pretty easily.  While I haven’t played the new game, by all accounts the launch was horribly mismanaged, with the “always-online” requirement locking players out and even erasing entire cities.  Though forced online play was an advertised part of the game from the start, it’s an unfortunate situation when you’re paying fifty dollars to effectively lease a game from a company, a company that can refuse to grant you access to the game whenever they feel like shutting down their servers.  This created a huge fuss when Blizzard tried it with Diablo III last year, but at least Diablo III worked (eventually). 

The problem is the multiplayer angle was never right for SimCity.  Multiplayer games are generally about competition, about maxing stats and staying ahead of other players.  SimCity is a game about screwing up.  In the previous games, only an elite few could make a fully functioning metropolis.  For the rest of us, the game was about filling in the map with junk until you gave up and summoned aliens to wipe it out.  The fun of SimCity comes from the joy of unfettered creation mixed with the utter frustration of watching your creation refuse to behave as planned.    

Though for many SimCity 2000 remains the ultimate version of the game, I have the fondest memories of the original game.  My first exposure to the game came not on the PC but the Super Nintendo, and my child brain was utterly fried by the possibilities.  For kids who had grown up playing almost only side scrolling action games, those first generation Super Nintendo games were a breath of fresh air.  Sure you had traditional games like Super Mario World, but there were also outside of the box titles like Actraiser (an action game mixed with an early RTS) and SimCity.  These were the kind of games you could only dream about on the original Nintendo; games where the player actually got to design and create their own world.   

Sadly, I didn’t actually own a Super Nintendo, and spending hours constructing your own city at a friend’s house isn’t exactly the most sociable of activities, so I eventually got the game for the PC.  The original 1989 PC version and the 1991 SNES version are essentially the same game, though the SNES version has a few more bells and whistles, along with a rather clumsy control scheme.  The PC version also had cool alternate graphics options allowing you to build a medieval or wild west city, something I would love to see return.  

Though fairly simple by the standard of later SimCity games, all the gameplay basics were there from the start:  worrying about money, worrying about crime, worrying about pollution, worrying about traffic, worrying about population, and summoning monsters.  Patience, almost incomprehensible patience, was the only way to win.  Or, like me, you could just hit SHIFT+FUND to build up a huge treasury, then build until the map was full, then spend a few minutes wondering why your city was a post-apocalyptic hellscape before starting it all again.

Whereas other games are all about instant gratification, SimCity is a game of small victories and slow progress.  You can spend hours upon hours just trying to balance the budget.  Even with SimCity 4 in 2003 (the most recent game before now) the formula was basically unchanged.  A SimCity fan who fell into a coma in 1990 and woke up in 2003 (thus missing the entire run of Batman:  The Animated Series) would be able to pick up and play the newer games without a hitch.  There was something constant and familiar about SimCity.

I’m not saying that change is bad or that innovations should be avoided, but SimCity was the absolute last series that needed to be online only.  The entire premise is that the player is a mayor of unstoppable god-like powers, free to do whatever she or he wants with the world.  By limiting city size and encouraging cooperative play, it seems like Maxis has removed an essential part of what makes SimCity so much fun.  Hopefully, once all the anger over the completely botched launch fades away, players will be able to find the appeal in the underlying game. 

 
For the rest of us, it sounds like the older games may do a better, more stable job of scratching the SimCity itch.  The original game is probably free at this point, SimCity 2000 can be bought from GoG.com for $6 dollars, and SimCity 4 is on Steam for $20.  Thanks in part to the problems with the new game, they’re selling quite well.  In the next SimCity game, perhaps “SimCity 2013 Release” can be one of the optional disasters.  As long as they keep the aliens.

Dear Mr. Watterson

For a comic strip that was so enormously popular in its time, there has been surprisingly little public discussion of Calvin & Hobbes.  There are no huge web communities, no toys, no video games, no $300 million Hollywood reboots staring Shia LaBeouf.  Of course, this is partly because of creator Bill Watterson's notorious refusal to merchandise his strip, but it also has to do with the medium itself.  Because Calvin & Hobbes is only the comic strips themselves, it was something we all experienced individually.  The world existed only in the headspace of the individual readers; like Calvin, we were free to see the strip's world any way we saw fit.



It's always surprising, then, to find out that this individual, personal part of your childhood was in fact an individual, personal part of everyone's childhood.  Though we were there separately, so many of us were there together.  For the generation of kids growing up in the 80s and 90s, Calvin was the comic.  For many, it was how we learned to read.  I was burning through Calvin & Hobbes books before I could pronounce most of the words.  The strip captured a vision of childhood (and adulthood) that resonated with any kid who had ever been misunderstood, bullied, marginalized, or denied access to Cannibal Stewardess Vixens Unchained by philistine parents.  Calvin & Hobbes, through gorgeous drawings and hilarious dialogue, proved as only the best art can that Hobbes is real, that the world is infinite and inviting, and that reality is optional.

Though Dear Mr. Watterson (at least from the trailer) looks to be little more than a bunch of people talking about how much they love Calvin, it may not need to be any more than that.  A few years ago a book, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, covered similar ground, but the author put too big an emphasis on finding the strip's reclusive creator.  We don't need to search for Calvin & Hobbes, we have it, and getting an interview with Bill Watterson won't unlock any secrets.  The best creations are bigger than their creator, and the best way to appreciate Calvin & Hobbes is not to go looking for the creator, but instead to talk to the people who loved it.  It's amazing how many of us there are.