


The new SimCity, however, rewards you for nearly everything. Knowledge came with time, however, and the game rewarded as much of it as I could spare to spend.

What I remember of the SimCity from my youth is a game that was hard - not so hard that my single-digit aged self couldn’t play with some degree of success, but just punishing enough that ignoring some of the finer points of transit planning, zoning and residential/commercial density could break my game in a very serious way. Besides the occasional sick-faced Sim, it took me weeks of in-game time to realize that I had done anything wrong. My favourite was the time I unwittingly placed a water filtration center in the middle of a polluted industrual zone, causing a large portion of the town to become sick. Or, when a mid-game foible left my factories without power, those in the affected zone remained for days before anyone thought to move out - and even then, the majority of factories remained. My Sims complain about crime constantly, for example, but despite having a single paltry police station for a city tens of thousands in size, the police seem to keep things in check. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
