Amnesia Lane: In memory of Maxis

Earlier this month, Electronic Arts took Maxis out to a quiet corner of the yard and closed it.

This came days after their disastrous return to the SimCity series (saddled with EA’s demand that the most basic of game functions be designed to support any flimsy excuse to be only playable online) was one-upped by a game that was simpler, but had less executive meddling: Cities: Skylines.

As I said goodbye to yet another once-unbeatable game studio eaten, digested and excreted by the two-time Consumerist Worst Company in America award winner, I remembered their games from the good ‘ol days.

Except SimFarm. That game sucked.

A wasted ream

I first got a taste of Maxis while visiting my younger cousin’s house. My aunt had provided him with a plethora of educational computer games… and nothing else. While Bailey’s Book House proved unriveting, there was one gem hidden among the selection: SimCity

While the original game was very limited in its visuals, it had many of the options well-known to the series: Setting tax rates, deliberately triggering disasters, regretting under-funding roads and the playable scenarios, each of which designed to show off some of the complex under-the-hood working of the game you might never have realized was there.

I was mesmerized by this game as soon as I gave it a try. Sadly, my Aunt limited the time my cousin and I could spend on the computer, so the experience ended all too soon.

However, I would not be denied. My cousin and I quickly set about trying to bring the experience out of the computer. While my time with SimCity was short, I had played enough of it to gleam a bit of how it appeared to work. The plan was for us to whip up some playing pieces, and I would try to GM my cousin building a SimCity.

We started working over a small pile of printer paper. We cracked out colored pencils and drew maps similar to the terrain of the city-building game. We filled other sheets with tiles of roads, zones and buildings (ill-suited for use as actual tiles due to our childish eyeballing of grid lines).

In the end, though, we never actually used them. We spent the whole night just making maps and pieces, and it was my last night there. Our plans were long forgotten on subsequent trips, and never revisited. For all I know, our work might have ended up in the trash heap the very next day, or is now lying dormant in a box in the attic.

Looking back, it was a very fitting first experience with SimCity; series creator Will Wright apparently drew his inspiration for the game from the realization that he was having more fun using the map editor for his first creation, Raid on Bungeling Bay, than he did playing the game itself.

Porn Tips Guzz Ardo

It might seem like I played dozens of games through middle school and the beginning of high school, and I did.

But if you only looked at me gaming on the family computer (a not-so-trusty Macintosh Performa 6200 series), you’d really only find me chipping away at two games: Master of Orion II and SimCity 2000.

SimCity 2000 for me remains the high-water mark of the series. It’s a shame, really. I’d love to play the game at higher resolutions with greater detail and more than 256 colors, but its three sequels are either over-designed or barely functional.

I spent some of my years with SimCity 2000 trying new and radical city designs to try to min-max traffic and pollution issues. I used its terrain editor to minimize water to the point where it didn’t run through the land, and I could still build a seaport and a marina to provide more land for building. I flattened the terrain to avoid costly landmoving, weird roads and the unzonable corner tiles of hills. I covered every last inch with a maximum saturation of trees. And, when the game began, I made a rigid grid to develop on. Knowing that zones wouldn’t develop more than three grids from a road, I filled the middles of my city’s blocks with hospitals, schools, police stations and firehouses.

Despite this weird building style, I never resorted to outright cheating; I never typed f-u-n-d or c-a-s-s. I turned to appropriations to get out of trouble, cranking Residential, Commercial and Industrial taxes to the maximum 20%, and cutting funds to everything but roads. Within a year, the city was almost completely empty and my coffers were full. Returning taxes to their old rates encouraged everybody to move back over the following year, secure in their knowledge that their suffering was not in vain, for the old power plant was able to be replaced before it exploded.

There was one four-letter word I did type, though, and it wasn’t d-a-m-n. I couldn’t afford that sort of massive drop in property taxes. As a Mac user, I had access to one extra little cheat code not present in the PC version: j-o-k-e.

The ability to overcome great fear

SimAnt was a rather oddball game that had a lot going on, but didn’t require much work from the player. Most of the games larger goals will occur on autopilot with you even realizing it. All you had to do was spread your colony to a single new patch of the yard, thus letting the now AI-controlled original patch of yard expertly beat the game for you.

As the mystical Yellow Ant (who was really a Black Ant, but you needed some way of easily identifying your avatar), you could inhabit the body of any ant in your colony, be they a worker, a fighter or a breeder. You could not take over the evil Red Ant bodies though, because they were an enemy since time immemorial.

While the game had you digging tunnels, stacking defensive walls with pebbles or gathering food for the queen, dangers were everywhere. If you took your worker out to gather food, you could run into a warrior Red Ant, who would crush your worker faster than a Hydralisk can rip apart an SCV. You could stumble into an antlion, drown in a rain puddle, be stomped on by the human or be sucked in and disemboweled by his lawnmower.

But the one danger that could kill me in real life (as evidenced by the shock I got the first time I stumbled upon it) was the spider. There I was, minding my Yellow-Ant business, when a humongous (due to scale) arachnid practically flew in from beyond the edge of my 640×480 pixel field of vision and almost instantly devoured me, showing a gruesome close up of its spidery face in the process.

I had been scared nearly to death of spiders since I was 5 years old. My father, in his infinite wisdom, decided the movie Arachnophobia was appropriate viewing for young children and the most obvious result took hold. Years later, death-by-spider in SimAnt was absolutely terrifying.

It was a while before I dared play the game again, knowing the spider was there. But I liked the oddballness of the game so much that I eventually tried it again. I discovered the minimap revealed the spider’s location, so I’d never get caught off-guard again. Later, when I was more daring, I discovered that a sizable army of warrior ants could overpower and kill the spider, a feat that the game would alert you to in case your ants put up the valiant fight without you.

But what really got me acclimated to the spider’s presence was an Easter Egg I discovered by accident: Your Yellow Ant essence could take over that leggy fiend. What happened next? What any red-blooded gamer would do after discovering such a secret. Each game of SimAnt would start with me possessing the spider and parking it over the the starting anthill of the Red Ants, eating every last one that dared come up to find food until their besieged queen starved to death (or until the spider had a nightmare that it was being eaten by an ant and dies. It happens, you know?).

While it didn’t provide a complete rehabilitation of my fear, it become much more manageable for the experience.

From playing city to playing house

There’s a lot I could say about playing he Sims, the deep and intricate game that saved the world by allowing everybody to work out their sociopathic tendencies on imaginary targets, but I think I can better sum up the experience with this: