The following is a reply I posted to the GameFAQs discussion board for the Super Nintendo classic “SimCity” almost a year ago. For the uninitiated, the game (related to the popular “Sims” series) simply involves laying out buildings and roads to construct a city, tweaking the layout to achieve optimal results and a higher population. There is no definite end or way to win the game.

Anyway, I just now stumbled upon this post I wrote, saved as a forgotten text file in one of my folders. It was posted in reply to a player who asked:

“i spent a half hour making this little city, it’s running perfectly..now what?”

“Now what?” you ask. Catharsis, of course.

I just finished building up an attractive Metropolis on the practice-mode island. I built my house in the middle of the central forest, and refused to allow any construction to encroach upon my estate except for a large park directly in front of my house (for private use, of course). I also left the northwest forested island untouched save for the addition of a single tree (the Sacred Yggdrasil) on the one unoccupied square.

I spent decades performing minor adjustments, trying to get it to 100,000 without compromising my specially reserved domains. I finally achieved it by restructuring the west coast to squeeze in a few extra industrial zones and then eliminating the industry on the east coast and replacing it with residential/commercial zones. Built up a funding surplus for a couple of years, cut taxes to zero, let it grow.

It was perfect.

I gazed upon it, letting a few years pass, watching the seasons change.

And then I knew that I had to destroy it, that I could not simply set it down and walk away.

The ground shook, the waters rose, the wind howled. The fires raged for years. The towers toppled, the Holy Tree was consumed, my palace and my people turned to ash.

When the flames finally died, when the rubble finally settled, I looked over the scattered broken ruins and imagined an old man standing beside the remnants of the crumbling library, telling his tale to travelers as they passed: “There once was a great city here…”

That, my friends, is how you “win” at SimCity.

Games, Misc | No Comments »

To add to what I mentioned in my last post:

While having nicely organized, easily accessible text would be very handy for purposes of translation, what would be even cooler would be a “text edit” option in the debug mode so that you can actually translate the original text while you play the game.

For example, you’re playing some dinky little RPG, walk into town, talk to random NPC.  The character’s dialogue pops up in a text box, as usual… and then you hit F1 or whatever to go into debug mode, hit the Edit option, and you can actually delete and replace the text, right there in the game.  Gives you a chance to see the text in context while you translate it, rather than trying to make sense from an out-of-context text dump…

Of course, I’m nowhere near being able to implement something like this, but I think it’s an awesome idea which I will most definitely make a point of implementing if and when I am capable of doing so… and if I ever make something worth implementing it in.

Programming | No Comments »