PC Game Fun Time

It’s been awhile since I last played a city-building game (since SimCity 4 came out in 2003, to be exact), and boy do I really need my fix. I’ve been addicted to the series since I filled up an entire box with floppy disks of SimCity 2000 saves on our family’s 386 many years ago. There’s nothing else that quite matches the thrill of being an urban planner — and no, I’m not being facetious.

So imagine my amazement when a friend pointed me to Cities XL, a city-building game in the SimCity tradition that I have absolutely no excuse for finding out about earlier. Cities XL is coming out in 2009 and will be a lot like the next release of SimCity, with an MMORPG twist — every other city on the planet in the game world is built by another player. That sound you just heard was the sound of me necessitating new pants.

In addition to the MMORPG element, and all the possibilities of trade/cooperation with other players that brings, Cities XL is also going to improve on the old grid-based landscape of all the old SimCity games. Roads can now be laid out in any direction, not just along the grid or at a 45 degree diagonal. Roads can even be curved. But it’s the highway construction that really has me excited. The video (you’ll have to navigate to it) shows the player fluidly constructing a major highway intersection, with multiple levels of ramps and curved overpasses. This is your opportunity to kick the clover-leaf intersection to the curb and make something so much cooler.

I’m definitely looking forward to Cities XL, and anyone who calls themselves a fan of the city-building genre should be as well. Will Maxis finally be surpassed in their own genre? Here’s hoping. If you don’t hear from me for several months in a row sometime in 2009, it’ll be because I’m constructing the most bustling metropolis on the face of the virtual planet.

We’re all probably at least <em>familiar</em> with MapleStory, the Korean 2D side-scrolling massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG), even if we’ve never played it. I’ve played World of Warcraft though, and I figure that’s close enough to be qualified to comment on this bizarrely inaccurate news article from Yahoo: Online divorcee jailed after killing virtual hubby. If anyone reading this has played MapleStory, maybe you can fill in the details in the comments below.

Upon first glance, I thought the article was talking about, you know, something that actually mattered: murder. People get “married” in online games all the time, and I could see fallout from the virtual world spilling over into the real world and resulting in a deadly altercation between the players behind the characters. But that’s not what this article is about. After reading through the article a bit, I realized that the “killing” they refer to is about a woman who “killed” her recently divorced husband’s character. So what, I thought? MapleStory probably has PVP. That should be a fairly common occurrence then, and the husband probably deserved it for dumping her abruptly anyway.

But no, when the article says “killing”, what it actually means is that the man hadn’t yet gotten around to changing his account password, and the woman logged in and deleted his character. So by attempting to sensationalize the news story, Yahoo actually made the story sound less serious to those in the know. Not that I think this rises to the level of meriting criminal hacking charges, mind you, which the woman is somehow facing.

So once you’ve managed to slog your way through the massively misleading inflammatory article (brilliant computer game journalism skills on display there, Yahoo), the real question you’re left with is: Does a jilted wife deserve anything close to a $1,000 fine and five years in prison for deleting a character in an MMORPG? I’m going to have to go with no — he should just get over it and learn a lesson from the school of hard knocks on not sharing his password with anyone — but depending on the extent of real-money trading (RMT) he was engaged in, he could possibly have suffered a severe financial loss from the deletion.

Which would bring up another question about whether a couple bits in an MMORPG’s database are actually worth the money people are willing to pay for them, but that’s another gargantuan topic in itself.