SimCity Social Review

With a new SimCity game on the horizon for the first time in too many years, I decided to break my usual habit of boycotting Facebook games for being wastes of good gaming time and try SimCity Social.

I was hoping it might scratch my SimCity itch, but it’s pretty much a standard free-to-play model Facebook game. It has pretty graphics and works very smoothly, but it still relies on spamming your friends to get anywhere at a decent pace. It still requires almost no thought or strategy to play.

The only way it captures any real sim flavor is in the humor. It’s been forever since I played a SimCity game — forever meaning the heyday of SimCity 3000 — so I don’t know if SimCity 4 included the kind of humor that has become one of the hallmarks of The Sims. But that humor is present in SimCity Social. One of the interactions you can have with your police stations is “Taze Someone”, and if you do the status bar for the action is labelled “GZZZZTTT!!!”. That’s a large part of why (coupled with a lack of time to play games I value more highly) I’m still playing it.

To end on a mostly-unrelated note: since last I posted anything I was finally convinced to try League of Legends. I’m rather taken with it. Last week I figured out how to farm decently with Ryze. Hooray!

My Entry for the TableTop Father’s Day Contest & TableTop in General

Mid last month, I finally uploaded a video with my face in it to YouTube. It was for the TableTop Father’s Day contest. The prize was getting to be one of five videos compiled into one and introduced by Wil Wheaton. The challenge: to explain how gaming and your dad are tied together in 60 seconds or less. Here is my entry, which made top ten, but not top five.

TableTop is a YouTube show, the goal of which is to introduce awesome tabletop games (board, card, and dice games) to viewers. Each episode runs 25-30 minutes, during which Wil Wheaton first explains the rules of the game, then plays through it with a few other nerdy celebrities so you actually get a feel for the flow of the game. Finer points of the rules are explained in text as they arise. If the game runs longer than the show allows for, they do a cut which is neatly stitched together with fun music and an overview of the score. Each episode is a compact yet thorough introduction to the featured game, with bonus points for the players being entertaining to watch.