Video Games

It's been interesting to have another crack at Simicyt 4 recently. I'm amazed that the game is 6 years old, having been released in 2003. I've essentially had one set of cities going for year, and every time I have a look at it, it feels different.

Simcity is one of those games with no end point, which essentially continues until you're sick of playing. I've stopped playing for long periods of time and always been able to come back and rethink things and do something different.

One thing that's struck me though recently is how little the game reflects some of the latest urban thinking in terms of an ability to create walkable / sustinable / livable spaces. This is not that surprising, but I do think it's interesting how difficult it is to really have super dense spaces. (This may just be my experience however).

The other thing is that i recently went through my video games box. This is the box that has all the boxes of software that I've purchasd over the years. Man are there a lot! It's been interesting to see how my interests have changed, and also how many games I have that I will likely never play again. I also realized how the sports titles that are released every year encourage you to buy more than you normally would. Small changes is rosters in the NHL do not deserve an entire update, you only get a good update every 3 year,s problem is it's never clear which years will be good, and which ones not.

I've been surprised to a certain extent how the video game market has seemed to move beyond the PC. I guess with all the HD TVs and increased capabilities of the gaming systems it's not that surprising, but a lot of the hottest games don't seem to be released for PC anymore. It's a shame, as I don't really want to buy a PS3 or a Wii particularly.

Simcity fun

So I've been playing Simicity 4 a bit more recently. I connected one of my cities to a bigger city through a subway line. I returned to my bigger city to play around and start building it up. Then all of a sudden I noticed this:

I was suddenly making 10,000$ a month! and my transit revenue was 10,000$ a month. I have never hit this high before. So I decided to look around and see what was happening. Lo an behold I ran into this!

That's all for today folks.

Oh and I expect to have more time (hopefully/maybe) to start updating more regularly. I'm taking one less course this semester, and have 2 days off a week. The other thing I am hoping to do is some serious reading. I have 2 main classic sort of books to hit this semester. Adam Smith's Wealth on nations, and On the road to serfdom by Hayek. We'll see how that goes. I'm thinking I should maybe read Smith's Theory of Moral sentiments first, but I'm not sure. The next big classic book will be by Keynes.

Simcity 4

Well there seems to be a lot of my friends playing simcity 4 so in deference to them i am posting my coolest building. This building is like 3 or 4 times the height of the hospital in the game and it just plain looks cool. This is not from a mod or anything, but from the game itself.