I GOT 99 PROBLEMS, AND THE WORST ONE IS GRIDLOCK TRAFFIC

After a few hours of Cities, watching traffic flow like this is highly comparable to an intense, psychedelic dream-state.

CITIES: SKYLINES Review.

Simulation games present an interesting design issue: a balance needs to be struck between accurately simulating what the game is supposed to -- building cities, T-boning pimp wagons, following dance steps -- and creating a gratifying play experience. I’ve never actually built a city in my life that wasn’t made out of Lego bricks or D&D character sheets, but I get the impression that Cities: Skylines manages to realize many of the inveterate puzzles of urban planning without turning it into a chore. Indeed, from micro to macro scale, the core design theme in Cities: Skylines seems to be a tightrope-walking, house-of-cards, mixed-metaphor balancing act.

In Cities, your task is to lay down the groundwork for a city that will attract and sustain the largest possible population. The casual passage of time in the game is when the buildings rise up and the traffic flows among the streets, but the real work takes place in hour-long pauses spent masterminding intersections and balancing zones, civic services, and taxes. The transition between the long pause and the resumption of space-time is the moment where you see whether your choices have had any effect. And even as an action RTS gamer, this unremarkable moment brings me incredible satisfaction when I see my plan work out.

These euphoric moments are owed largely to the depth of Cities. Everything is interconnected. Individual civilians have names, jobs, and troubles. Building a network of pedestrian walkways will alleviate commuter traffic. Dead civilians need a hearse to conduct them to the cemetery. Small foibles can add up to crippling frustrations, sometimes to the extent of a plummet in population and income, and the mass destruction of your city by tornado and UFO abduction (actually Cities: Skylines lacks Sim City’s destructive gratifications), and doing the legwork of investigating what’s going wrong, and then tentatively correcting it for the desired result, presents a calming puzzle throughout the development of your city. While a solution may solve your initial problem, all factors are intermingled, and you can cause backswing problems to arise elsewhere in your city. This is especially true when attempting to reroute high-traffic streets - much of the time all you can do is forward traffic to other intersections, rather than eliminate it. As the city sprawls - your citizens will demand more Industrial, Commercial, and Residential zones, which requires connections to the road network, water, electricity, fire and medical coverage, and probably a bunch of other shit - the urban Jenga tower begins to sway further and further from side to side, and those incremental inefficiencies have greater and greater impact.

I think my early experience with the game is accurately conveyed by my save file names...('crazy noobtown', 'grbg???','NewSave'',ooo','real town', 'slightly less crazy' and 'ugh' respectively.

For me personally, difficulty level is hugely influential in my reaction to a game. Challenges need to be solvable without being cursory, and they need to ramp up steadily. With a few exceptions (hello, 90-degree highway merges), all your troubles in Cities will have been caused by you. Each city is first founded on an empty space, and problems only arise as your growing network of infrastructure begins to tie knots in itself. In this way, Cities maintains a caliber of difficulty while still being completely relaxing. There’s no one to blame for any of your problems but yourself; and there’s nothing stopping you from re-paving Spaghetti Junction other than a few minutes of income or an instant loan. Now, don’t get me wrong. When you start Cities, you will fuck up in ways you don’t even understand. I think I founded 7 cities in my first 2-3 hours playing the game, oftentimes running out of budget for water and power before ever unpausing the game. Other times a pandemic will sweep a suburb, killing everyone within weeks. There will be gridlock traffic jams made up of nothing but emergency vehicles and garbage trucks. Sixteen-wheelers will spend hours traversing the aforementioned Spaghetti Junction just to leave the city. And I think everybody, at least once, will place a water pump downstream of the sewage outflow pipe. But the patterns of reasoning the game nudges you towards make no problem unsolvable. With a click you’re able to query map templates to indicate pollution, traffic density, public health, and other factors; you can also query individual civilians and vehicles to find out where they’re going, and if & why it is they’re struggling to get there (This is a task that real-life traffic engineers are sometimes required to do). Thus the problem-solving rubric of diagnose, prescribe, apply seems equally essential in both virtual and actual city management.

I cringe to use the word for a game I’ve enjoyed, but I might hazard that the way Cities highlights real-world problems in an interactive medium, could categorize it as edutainment. I mean, after these long, sexy nights of infrastructure engineering, when I crawl from my lair and cringe at the sunlight, I look around and start recognizing the principles I’ve learned from Cities at work in my actual city. Commercial zones tend to buffer residential from industrial. Highways and roundabouts are spatially inconvenient, but functionally crucial installations in every city. Public transit can cause as much traffic as it’s intended to prevent. Perhaps these are all obvious truths to any driver; but Cities projects into your mind a kind of bird’s-eye view of city networks, makes you aware of why cities are the way they are. Sometimes they’re all sprawled out because, at the time those roads were built, explosive growth in the future had not been anticipated. Other grids, like major downtown urban districts, tend to be densely organized and well serviced. Sometimes the geography itself makes it impossible to keep everything connected and organized. In any case, it just ain’t easy.

I enjoyed Cities for its tasteful difficulty curve, its relaxing gameflow, and its edutainment value. The game's threshold of worthwhileness fluctuated up and down for me over the course of my first few sleepless nights playing it, but there was this one highway intersection that I paused the game to perfect for about 30 minutes, and the feeling of satisfaction following that, about 5 hours into the game, assured me the game was worth the time. I'm pushing 19 hours now and though my city is nothing to boast about, I'm starting to see that growing your city is sorta-kinda more of the same after first few thousand citizens, and my worthwhileness factor is starting to top out a bit. So if you're looking for a fun and bright city-building experience for 5-19 hours, then I would recommend Cities Skylines.

I purchased Cities: Skylines on the Steam Summer Sale (now it's 32.99) and have played 20 hours total, using a few cosmetic mods, as well as an auto-demolisher tool for abandoned and burned-down buildings.

ROGUELIKES AS SIMULATIONS OF HELL.

The game is FTL. I’m on a good run, boasting a well-trained crew of 6, all different species, and advanced upgrades for my ship including a cloning chamber in my med-bay. Then, halfway through the Sixth sector, a hostile one, I run out of fuel. My SOS beacon draws pirates and a terrible battle ensues. My hull is close to collapsing, most of the crew are dead, and heavy rocket fire is destroying all the systems on the ship. I deal enough damage to the enemy vessel to force their retreat, and then, utterly without hope, I throw open the airlocks to release what oxygen remains and provide my beloved crew a dignified death.

Just as Ryan the Mantis is about to watch his own body multiplicatively balloon in size due to space exposure, and release me, the player, from enduring the sick death parade that is FTL, something bizarre happens. A clone of Kadreal, my starting human captain, suddenly appears in the med bay, born into a burning ship totally devoid of oxygen. As his own breath crystallizes in his respiratory tract, he sees Ryan -- rather, Ryan’s clone -- crawl out of the same birthing machine he just did … and the cycle goes on. And on. My crew will never be free from the torture of birth and death. And devoid of fuel, my ship will be forever lost in drift. FTL: Hell in Space.

I like stories told this way, because in spite of putting you through the same hell again and again (as in films such as Moon, Triangle or As Above So Below) -- or more accurately, putting you through similar hells again and again -- telling stories of hell through a video game offer the possibility that any attempt could be the one that sets you free.

Ever since The Binding of Isaac came out, I’ve identified Roguelike as my favourite type of game. Roguelikes provide an infinitely variable arcadey experience which doesn`t just invite, but challenges you to even hope to reach the end in the course of one, precious life; the tension drawn between the randomized continuity of gameplay obstacles and the unchanging, overarching goal strikes a perfect note. You don’t hit checkpoints in Roguelike games; you just die, and try again -- but it’s not even trying again, because you’re not playing the same game anymore. You’re trying something new. Unlike storymode rail shooters, 70-hour RPGs, or grand RTS games, which are technically identical experiences for everyone who plays them, random generation gives you something numerically unique; nobody else will ever have played the exact run that you did. You will certainly never play the same run twice. There is no way to cheat a well-designed Roguelike, no optimal strategy or easy way out. The only way to make it through to the end is to build an excellent, practiced, probabilistic model inside your head of how a dungeon generally ought to go. You can only beat these games by really knowing them, and efficiently dealing with them from one obstacle to the next. This agreement between designer and player really appeals to me.

Roguelikes universally present a journey through hell. I don’t mean this in regards to the challenge or frustration of individual obstacles, or even the pain of suddenly dying to a low-difficulty obstacle, deep into a promising runthrough; what I refer to when I call Roguelike a hellish experience, is the perpetual futility that overarches all playthroughs. The player (or I should say, player-character) is doomed to relive the same mistakes, suffer the same plights, regret the same flubs, over and over again -- what better definition of Eternity in Hell could there be? Every new run is just another opportunity to be thwarted by familiar foes. One never necessarily sees the same room twice in these purgatories, and yet recognizes all of them in a chilling deja vu.

 I mean hell, in the game Rogue Legacy, you pay the toll to the ferryman of the underworld every time you (re)enter the dungeon. Unequivocally, whatever the player-character believes his mission to be, he is just returning to Hell, again and again, to relive his past errors, and hopefully, if ever, to redeem them in the end. The hope of redemption, I believe, is what sets a videogame in Hell (Roguelikes), apart from a film in Hell (horror movies). A horror film or book must have its hero perpetually living through the same pain, never to be redeemed. Even if, at the end of the story, the hero is freed from punishment, she must start over again for the next viewer or reader. in Roguelike, though, there is hope. The imposition of player’s freedom of choice allows each story to go differently. Maybe some players put the game down after awhile, never reaching the coveted FINAL ROOM. Maybe some are lucky or skilled enough to beeline to the end very quickly. And still others strive through, building up their skills and acumen, and fight their way back out into the overworld.

Apart from other Roguelikes, Rogue Legacy emphasizes not just the uniqueness of each attempt, but the unique array of cumulative gains from repeat attempts. One toon’s runthrough could increase the HP of all future successors, giving them a better chance at pushing even further through the dungeon. After a few dozen generations, I’ve created an abundant genealogy which allows me to clear far more rooms on average than I could at first, earning even more resources to improve stats. You can even prevent the dungeon from re-randomizing if you want to attempt it again with the next generation.

In this way, the game always has you facing forward. On death, you aren’t thinking to yourself “Well, that was all for nothing...” -- instead you’re thinking to yourself, “Ah man, my kid is gonna do way better than me!” In contrast to the unpredictable patterns of dungeon and character randomization is a whole suite of tools to counteract them. Good games (especially Roguelikes) leverage randomness against planning and skill.