More like ‘shitty planning’
And here I thought being a public official would get me laid.
It turns out any clout built up by being the sole city planner gets et up when the citizens’ homes are filled with sewage because of your incompetence.
Having just come back from Tokyo — one of the best cities in the world — for Tokyo Game Show, I thought it would be wonderfully appropriate to use Tokyo as my aspiration for messing around with the excellent Cities: Skylines‘ expansion After Dark. After all, the biggest addition (which is actually a free update to the base game), the day and night cycle, lends itself well to the light up show that is nighttime Tokyo.
Well, you know how Tokyo is real great? Turns out that was a lot of hard work put in by a lot of smart people (and relatively recently laid infrastructure following devastating war). Tokyo wasn’t built in a day, and all that. Aim for the moon and you might still end up in the stars, eh? Well, no, fuck that, the moon is way closer than the stars and I’m still bankrupt with a city that resembles tangled-up Christmas lights more than a hospitable environment.
City planning more like “shitty planning,” am I right folks?
17:28 I dragged one of our cat trees — the one with the abandoned dumbbells weighing it down — and set a pillow in front of it so I could sit in the middle of the living room, closer to the TV. I do not have my contacts in or the energy to put my contacts in. I am sitting on an inflatable, portable seat one might take to sit on bleachers in a stadium and my lower half is wrapped in a throw blanket. My feet tap at the entertainment center and I worry I will turn the Xbox One on.
Fuck. I actually just turned the Xbox One on. This isn’t even even a joke (not unlike much of my humor). I started writing fearing I’d forget whatever fevered nonsense was my dreamt-up angle and I just kicked the fucking thing on. Jesus. I am a slightly less put-together city planner than whomever drew up the East Coast.
17:36 The newsfeed in the new “After Dark”-tinged menu reads: “Problems Loading/Creating Cities? Click Here for the Solution!” After turning the Xbox on I am anticipating problems and feel like preemptively asking for the solution.
17:38 All my strength is going towards not choosing the “Diamond Coast” map for a new game because its “Suitable area for building” is 69%. I already can’t figure out which map best represents Tokyo or remember what “boreal” means. Google tells me. Google also tells me Diamond Coast is a place in Ireland, which I bet is a lot like Japan, so that’s why I have picked it after all (and not for the 69).
17:43 Oh my god the tutorial text is so small.
17:45 Building roads and also not drawing penises with the roads, a good start.
17:49 Oh god, not only are there curved roads, but there are elevated roads. This has become roller coaster tycoon. This is not like Japan at all. I have built an enormous ramp to nowhere, to the end of the known world. Oh god, there are tunnels, too? I tried to connect a tunnel to the outside world but it’s just a half-mile dead end under the outlying freeway. And it connects to a giant series of roads in my town. I thought this would work.
17:55 It’s nighttime now and it looks very ominous. The people are wanting for every single basic necessity: power, water, waste treatment, internet, a fancy cheese shop. It is a miracle they found their way into town at all. The elevated road to nowhere is lit up, dotted on both side with street lamps, but they are not plugged in, there is no power grid. They must be getting power by much more arcane means.
18:06 Japan is clean and forward thinking. I erected a wind turbine. A water pumping station and sewage treatment plant sit on the fraction of coast I have available, far from the inept roads and angry citizens. I think I correctly put the waste dumping bit down stream so as to not feed them poop. The water pipes and those two facilities make an amateurish rhombus. Nighttime again and the wind turbine glows in the distance away from civilization next to…palm trees? I do not think Ireland has palm trees and I do no think that Tokyo has palm trees, but my childhood home in San Francisco did have a giant palm tree in the backyard. Things don’t always make sense.
My citizen’s thirst and high-maintenance demand for electricity sated, I zoom into this mess to hear dogs barking and birds chirping. It almost resembles a suburb, just drawn up by a child with limited spatial awareness and even less Lego blocks.
The “needs” bubbles hovering atop each household look like guns. No, citizens. You are supposed to be Japan, not America. Cease this gun lust.
18:13 Those were not cartoon guns; they were sewage pipes. I have messed up the sewage. Peoples’ homes are filled with shit.
18:21 I fixed it. I forgot to supply power to the sewage treatment plant. Unfortunately by the time I did it was in the most roundabout possible way and I ran out of money. I do not know what is more ominous: 1) the game’s zoomed-out soundtrack or 2) the din of suburbia when you zoom into multi-level blue homes and the lives of little people who don’t know their lives are being governed by an idiot who turned the Xbox on with his foot and has a quarter-mile, below-ground tunnel leading to a dead end. The streets look like the Windows 3D pipes animated screen saver or a badly played game of Snake.
18:29 The sound design in this game is terrifying. The commercial district is a roar of trucks and storefront shutters. The yakisoba joint advertises “tasty noodles” but that is a lie. It has no water running to it as I have run out of money. The game is warning me of bankruptcy. It offers me a $50,000 bailout with 0% interest, 0 monthly cost. If only real life would be so kind.
I reject it. I would rather let my citizens suffer than accept charity.
18:42 I tried to continue the road to nowhere and bring it down into a new industrial sector and, good lord, look.
Cars are driving up it now and doing impossible 180 degree turns and I feel ill.
18:51 I have reached a population of 500. I am a “Little Hamlet,” in that I too am poisoned by inefficacy and unable to avenge Tokyo by making it in this video game. My state is rotten.
18:53 I consider building a hospital across from two landfills.
20:01 Someone has died. I have built my first cemetery. I bleed money. I have taken as many loans as possible. I cannot seem to build enough firehouses. My city burns. Businesses demand more educated workers. It asks to build public transport, but I am poor. I raise taxes and people riot. My city of 3,500 does not have the glorious neon of Tokyo. The endless high rises and suffocating streets and touts and steep stairwells. My citizens tweet hashtags unironically, like morons.
20:12 I build a cemetery (for real this time; the bodies must have been rotting) and hundreds of green smiley faces erupt from local residences. Same.
My city of 5,000 is a far cry from Tokyo’s 13.35 million. And, as evidenced, I am not so competent to tell you how dramatic things like setting different daytime and nighttime budgets for utilities go on to affect your success.
Really, I don’t think Cities has ever been too challenging, as it has twice now accommodated my complete lack of forethought and neighborhood building by way of penciling in the margins and connecting with carets and arrows. But the day and night cycle itself is quite beautiful and the additions like prisons, taxis, bus terminals, bikers, and international airports all work towards making a more robust simulator helping you build whatever nightmare town your heart desires.
Me, I’m going to dip into the mod sections and recreate High Planes Drifter.
