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A L S O__T O D A Y
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R E C E N T L Y First Amendment wins another round online The resurrection of Golgotha The Web's identity crisis The 21st Challenge No. 18: Microsoft antitrust haiku
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ALIENS BLEW UP MY GARBAGE DUMP! | PAGE 1, 2
So I was a bit nervous in 1999. First, SimCity 3000 was long overdue, years late in the making, and had backed away from a much-publicized plan to transform the game into a 3-D extravaganza. Second, Maxis itself was no longer a scrappy little independent company. Infatuated with its own success, Maxis had gone public, and then released a string of failures, lost millions of dollars and been forced to merge with a much larger game company, Electronic Arts. Braun was now a vice president, and the company headquarters had moved up the highway to Walnut Creek, a city that is the epitome of everything I wouldn't want in my SimUniverse -- bland and corporate. And finally, the personal computer revolution had also lost some of its mid-'90s glee. E-mail was old hat, and the daily news flash about the latest mega-stock swap between absurdly overvalued Internet companies seemed less a harbinger of a new order than a reminder that nothing, really, had changed at all. Few games, no matter how well produced, could live up to that kind of pressure. As my nascent city began to grow, I shrugged at the markedly improved graphics -- after five years one would hope that the graphics would be dramatically better. I had to admit that the level of detail was extraordinary, and the variety of units -- buildings, airplanes, yachts -- significantly expanded. But still, there was no sense of a breakthrough. Yes, the addition of actual Sim citizens scurrying through the streets and Sim cars and trucks getting snarled in traffic jams was pretty cool -- but it also strained the limits of my Pentium 233MX processor and graphics card. The interface is easier to use, and the addition of "landmarks" -- exquisite renderings of actual real-world architectural wonders like the Arc de Triomphe and the Empire State Building -- is welcome. But as I struggled to get the balance of industrial, residential and commercial zoning correct and set up my water pumps and police stations and schools, the experience seemed so familiar as to be blasé. Nothing new to see here; move along, please. Then a rampaging band of aliens materialized out of nowhere and nuked my waste-to-energy conversion plant. And I had a big garbage problem. First of all, I didn't zone for landfill early enough, so I was playing catch-up from the get-go. After I caught on, I hustled to build a recycling plant and an incinerator, way out at the outskirts of my town -- SimCity 3000 citizens are especially picky about where they live. Finally, I scraped together the funds to build an expensive waste-to-energy conversion plant. But I was still living on the edge of garbage disaster. And suddenly, a swarm of UFOs was rampaging through my atmosphere, taking potshots. Boom -- there goes the conversion plant. Of course, at this point, I had no cash reserves, since I'd spent it all on a huge science-park boondoggle. I zoned for landfill frantically, but the heaps of stinking trash filled the available space faster than I could create them. My citizens began to complain, and I couldn't blame them -- their homes and businesses were disappearing, replaced by mounds of stinking trash. I had to bite the bullet and take out a couple of usurious bank loans immediately to be able to buy two new conversion plants. Only now I was running a major budget deficit in order to pay back the loans. No matter -- I was ruthless. I roamed across my poor city, blowing up schools and hospitals, even a fire station or two. I had no remorse. It was all for my citizens' own good. Oh yeah, and I agreed to let a somewhat sinister character build his sarin gas disposal factory in my old downtown. Hey, man, I needed the cash. And then those damn hippies rioted. And then the aliens invaded, again. And took out one of my conversion plants, again. Hmmm. Was there a pattern here? The aliens were going straight for my garbage chokepoint. The citizens were rioting over environmental threats. And me? I was completely sucked in. My city was a living, breathing organism that needed me to steer it to prosperity -- or into the dumps. The true spirit of SimCity lives on: Garbage disposal über alles. And that's a good thing.
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