GAMING AIN'T FILM

As I was playing through 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order a little while ago it occurred to me that I was playing a great movie. After a few fervent early missions killing robotic mega-Nazis, you enter a peaceful homebase area and interact with a small cast of friendly characters. As I spoke to each of the rough-and-tumble renegades, scoured their candlelit quarters for juicy backstory details, and trawled through countless newspaper articles describing the establishment of the totalitarian Nazi superpower across the globe through the 40s and 50s, I realized I was part of a story that desperately wanted to be told in full. Much like a movie, it felt as if Wolfenstein wanted me to see each minute detail of its story piece by piece until everything came together in my mind. The key thing here is that the game wanted me to SEE these details -- and not PLAY them…

Click here for Nazi-approved, German-language Beatl- *aherm* Die Kafer smash-hit, "Mond, Mond, Ja, Ja".

Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed New Order overall, and I’d recommend it. But as a game it’s just mediocre. Strip away all these rich story details, tense dialogue exchanges (which you don’t control; you just sort of watch your character talk), and lovable characters, and you’ve got a fairly inarticulate dual-wielding run-and-gun corridor FPS game. If the writing had been weaker, I don’t think I would have been motivated to grind through some of the more tedious “DO THIS THING HERE!” challenges that the game inelegantly chucks you into. But it carries so well as a movie you want to know the ending to, that the anemic gameplay passes as fun a lot of the time. And this identifies a blurring line between games and film as the former continues to balloon as an industry -- what other entertainment medium has grown so large, so quickly?

In the wake of the financial success of consoles in the 90s, the largest budgets for videogame production are rising to compete with Hollywood films, with the star talent, CGI, and marketing campaigns to match. A co-worker of mine told me he’s interested in gaming: he moonlights as a foley guy for TV and commercials, and he suspects that videogames are where the real money is nowadays -- even for an industry as film-niche as sound production.

However I think this is a mistake. I think the real similarity between movies and gaming pretty much ends at budgetary magnitude. To treat gaming as just… home video in a different type of VCR sells it short of its potential, and leads to exploitative licensing cash-ins like the new Star Wars videogame. I do appreciate that some games work well as kind of surrogate films (looking to aforementioned Wolfenstein and Metal Gear Solid) but these linear narratives really feel like they sprawl too wide and deep to be contained in the silver screen; they take advantage of the affordances of gaming to tell a bigger story. And in the rare cases where the depth of gameplay matches the depth of story, nothing’s more fun. These days, many AAA titles aim to awkwardly recreate the cinematic experience through a controller and the result is usually a deadened game and a dull movie. I played through Hitman: Absolution and Deus Ex: Human Revolution when I built my PC last year, and both games seem to sacrifice so much of their well-loved gamey-ness for a dull, mass-appeal movie-ness. No player sits down and hopes not to push any buttons in a 10 minute interval. The difference in appeal between literary depth, and interactive depth, should be respected.

I mean, even in name they indicate something radically different. The whole activity of film isn’t called “movie-ing.” It’s too passive. As a medium, it’s called film or cinema - a simple noun. As a whole activity, the other medium is referred to as gaming - a present-tense verb; something that is being done. There’s plenty of room for flexing the semantics of this distinction but regardless it can be agreed upon that gaming needs to take a different industrial arc than film does, so those massive pools of resources can fuel innovation and interactivity, and not just mass-appeal spectacles.

'BONE TOMAHAWK' IS MY BONE DADDY

Whatever your doing right now probably isn't as important as watching this movie. It is customarily routine for me to keep a watchful eye on interesting films in some of my favorite genres: Horror and Westerns. I think we can all raise a guilty hand to being some form of genre fanboy or girl. Neglecting a shitty flick for a great set or setting- for the flavor of the story alone. But we need those bad movies don't we? They are just as important as the good ones because, of course, they elevate the great films and show us what 'good' is suppose to look like. 

You ever find something online so  perfect that you covet it and share it with your friends with your own 'trust me its awesome' seal of approval? Only to watch those friends turn around- claim it as theirs? Isn't it hard not to claim it as your own treasure? And doesn't it hurt a bit when your friends fail to acknowledge that it was you who found it in the first place? This is one of those treasures for me but im sharing it with yous guys in case you might have missed it.

It is what it looks like. Its a Western Horror movie. Two things I've unknowingly and unconsciously desired for quite some time. Probably ever since i saw Unforgiven as a kid and fell in love with the Western genre. Its well written, all the sentences are complete and courteous. With every syllable perfectly accounted for. Back in the good ole days when using slang was like saying 'CUNT' to your grandmother. 

IMDB is showing that the budget for the movie was $1.8 million. So virtually nothing. With all the great acting littering the story you can almost see Kurt Russell reading the script and calling all his friends to climb on board. Everyone is here because they fell in love with the script. Clearly they are not as interested in the money as they are with telling a unique story. It's original, oddly compelling and suspenseful. 

You will hear us talking about tension and suspense a lot, so your going to have to get use to that. It's an intriguing device in storytelling. It's cheap ( pretty much free) but rarely used effectively. But when it does- WHOAH BABY! Although the tense moment mean nothing without the payoff. Usually the payoffs ,in this case, look like somebody getting there head blown apart, point being the film doesn't chise out on you. Also the jaw bone tomahawks are magical and can cut anything in half. The action is very brutal and gave my wife a rough 'sleep.' The violence here felt like a rich meal -  something you can understand and fill up on with a few bites.

So the deal here is some drifter walks all over some cannibalistic native predator monsters 'sacred ground' and get chased into town. They kidnap sheriffs deputy and some hot chick doctor. Sheriff "old Kirtypants" heads out to recover them. Nice and simple, like a western should be.  The 'savages' are a cartoonish version of a 'Native' Its the furthest thing from human. Im glad they took the enemies to the extreme physically, it would have been awkward if they hadn't gone so monsterish. 

All told this was a well thought out surprise from, not a first time director, but someone getting the hang of things. Thanks Craig Zahler your bones are really sharp. 

'ALRIGHT YOU PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS LISTEN UP'

  SPOILER ALERT. SPOILER ALERT. AWOOGA .THIS WILL RUIN THE SHOW IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT YET.

Ash vs Evil Dead could be the most flawless, badass show on tv right now. I'm only done the 3rd episode as of last night and had to jump online to write about it with all the enthusiasm of a rookie cop, or that UPS dude from Mad TV. I'm tripping over myself searching for convincing words for you and have no doubt at all that it's the best show of the year already. Yes it's presumptuous, brazen maybe even slightly audacious, but this show is so fucking good that its amazing that your reading this blurb instead of watching the show right now.

I'm reeling in a bloody pool of mixed nostalgia and disbelief- this show shouldn't exist. It's a miracle that it was ever made at all. Its out of its feature film habitat. 30 years later, a cult horror movie that was a student project of a young enthusiastic- very hands on filmmaker and a b grade lead actor. Well B+. It's like the Mad Max of TV. A project that by rights has no business existing but does, It not only exists, it flourishes.

So what the hell happened?! I mean a great show on tv is like finding a Leprechaun, I feel like I can't even breathe too hard or the show will blow over. It's a fragile and delicate thing that must be protected and studied. This is how fan service is done. Having something turn out so well and exceed all expectations is so very rare. Ash vs evil dead comes across so authentic.

The first thing an Evil Dead fan might notice is how Ash vs Evil Dead seems to totally disregard the last film in the series. At the end of Army of Darkness he's sent back in time to s-mart, fucks up the words again and fights more Demons that somehow caught up with him. In the pilot episode he just has the book already and drunkenly reads passages from it to impress a girl. That whatever attitude from the writers is exactly the spirit of what evil dead is. So ash has the book of the dead now and the fans are fine with that, if your an Evil Dead aficionado and you don't have a sense of humor then you must be dead already. If all the sequel ducks were in a row here then they would have to explain how he got the book back which would bring up the medieval timeline and kind of ruin the story, not to mention the budget.

Which brings me to the writing. "I hear a lot a yappini'n and not a lot a happeni'n'" or "The first thing i gotta do is see a guy about a book. The other first thing i gotta do...is some cardio, cuz my hearts jack hammeri'n like a quarterback on prom night." are probably my favorite phrases since 'Wu peed on my rug.' Its written with love and a blase' attitude that made the show perfect all those many years ago- creative, not very PC and the best one-liners around. My epiphany was realizing, I guess in episode 3, that  the audience has never really had the chance to explore the Necronomicon ex mortus by itself. All we've ever really seen is the same couple of pages over and over again. There's a whole show just in the book. In episode 3 we got a taste of whats possible. Summoning crazy boss daemons. It's like pans labyrinth had dirty demon sex with a hologram and its fucking badass!

"Ya know, you don't look anything like your picture!"

I also never realized what an idiot ash is. I mean yeah he forgot some words way back in the 90's. Now he's single, over weight,  lives in a trailer and is still a stock boy at not S-mart. He reads the pages again and  So he's got absolutely nothing to lose so the show has room to just not waste our time and get movi'n. But he's so oddly likable and sentimental and has a strange courageous charisma that only seems to reveal itself when the demon blood's flying. This character is so iconic that even the Millennials must know who Bruce Campbell is. 

The camera angles and the gore are exactly what I was hoping for. Writers and filmmakers these days are so concerned with being creative that they totally forget that the source material was perfect just the way it was. Just re-create that and shut up, stop thinking and simply re-purpose the old goofy shit! Garden hoses of monster blood is just fine with everyone, trust us Starz. Even the demons look the same, it's the exact right amount of nostalgia with a fresh episodic vigor that should support the show all by itself.

The Icing generously slathered onto the cake is that it's only episode 3 and the momentum seems to be in favor of a very promising and hilariously entertaining story. Let's hope they don't fuck it up.

Oh yeah ans Xena is on it. Remember the last time you saw those two together!? Damn shes hot, i think she was my first crush. I also remember the strange Lesbianish relationship she had with that red headed maid girl she was with all the time. 

MOVIE REVIEW: A DREDD-FUL DISAPPOINTMENT

NO SMILING. ONLY DREAD.

I'll be honest, I never read the 2000AD Judge Dredd comic, and I never saw the 1995 Stallone movie. My knowledge of Judge Dredd was limited to a brief magazine review of the 2003 video-game adaptation, and entailed Dredd's access to some interesting types of bullets for his gun. I'm not sure what compelled me to see 2012's Dredd, other than some vague recommendations by a friend or two and a general desire last night to get back into watching action movies. For these reasons I was able to watch Dredd as "just a movie," with no expectations.

Turned out no expectations was still too many.

Dredd is a day in the life of Joseph Dredd, a high-powered police Judge in the post-nuclear dystopia of Mega-City One, USA. Walled off from the irradiated wasteland that is the rest of the continent, and possibly the world, Mega-City One is a single, continuous, sprawling urban landscape (punctuated by 200+ storey, brand-named Megastructures) that spans most of the Northeast region of the USA. Since life in this society has been mostly insulated from the nuclear devastation outside, corporate monopoly, economic inequality, and state control have run rampant. Surveillance drones casually oversee 16-highway intersections, and offenses as basic as begging are punishable by several weeks in solitary confinement. Understandably, this claustrophobic situation has led to a lot of poverty, gang crime, and violent resistance against the systems of control. Enter the Judges: a new breed super-cop with advanced weaponry and apparently unlimited use-of-force rights when it comes to fighting crime. Dredd himself is a paragon among them, his reputation for dispensing merciless justice unrivaled. There is just... so much to work with here!

EXTREMELY BRIEF PLOT SYNOPSIS (SPOILERS AHEAD)

After witnessing how badass Dredd (Keith Urban) is, we see him assigned a psychic mutant rookie recruit by the name of Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thirlby). Dredd goes full hard-ass on her but she doesn't seem phased. Together they check out a few dead bodies at the ghettoized Peach Trees Mega-Structure - the victims skinned and intoxicated before being thrown to their deaths - and Anderson's recruit assessment turns into a lethal grind up 200 stories of brutal gang violence. Once the "ex-hooker"-turned-druglord Ma-Ma (played by a much, much mellower Cersei Lannister) catches wind of a Judge on her turf, she locks down the Mega-Structure and engages the Judges with thugs, gatling guns, and traitorous, bounty-hunting Judges of her own. Dredd has his doubts about Anderson's ability to cope with the job, but through the use of her psychic abilities and fighting prowess, she proves so useful in the final takedown of the gang that Dredd forgives her many transgressions of Judge policy. Yet when they finally throw Ma-Ma from the top floor of the building and meet reinforcements, Anderson gives Dredd her badge and walks off, while Dredd tells the Chief Judge she was a Pass. Roll credits.

GRIPE 1: CHARACTERS.

DREDD: Judge Dredd is basically Robocop with Duke Nukem neuro-software. Ruthless, efficient, perpetually grimacing and ever-helmeted. I love it. Trouble is, the movie never, not once, questions his generous use of violence. Why is Dredd so committed to the profession? Was he orphaned and brought into training, like Anderson? Is he overcompensating for a guilty criminal past? And why doesn't Dredd work with a partner, like other Judges seem to? This would have been such a perfect place for the old stereotype of the dead partner - maybe Dredd starts to slip up in attempts to stop another partner from dying (even after warning Anderson that 1 in 5 recruits die during assessment). At the very beginning of the movie, Anderson psychically probes Dredd, and sees... something else... behind his severe interpretation of the law -- yet this is never followed up on !! I was positive the movie would go on to develop Anderson's growing understanding of the monster inside the man she'd been assigned to - about his history and motivations - but Dredd's character arc throughout the movie is completely static. He doesn't learn, he doesn't change; nothing even seems to surprise him. Not only do we have no way of relating to Dredd through backstory or exposition; we have no reason to really admire him, because he spends the whole movie just enforcing the rules he's been taught.

The classic "Holy fuck I literally just shot up a room full of innocent drug addicts" face.

ANDERSON: Dredd works so hard to establish Anderson is the atypical strong female that she ends up having very little character to hold onto - though I must admit I was relieved there was a reason she was the only Judge not wearing a helmet (it interferes with her mind-reading). Early in the movie, Dredd pushes her to execute a... drug-user (??) in a bust, and her guilt is magnified when the dead man's wife later helps them evade the gangsters. There seems to be a dangerous sympathy that accompanies her telepathy, but this is quickly abandoned. Anderson hesitates, but never doesn't kill people. After her first killing, Anderson expresses no further agency other than at the end, where she walks off the force. She doesn't explore what it means to be a Judge, or how she can really make the world a better place; she just does the job perfectly, and then rejects it. This is a wasted opportunity for what should've been an interesting character arc. Lastly, through the first two acts of the movie, we get several references to Anderson's mutant status - in the Judge Dredd universe, mutants are a reviled minority of deformed freaks, with Anderson being the attractive exception - yet we don't see one single mutant throughout the movie, not even among the drug- and crime-dependent poor who comprise the enemy ranks. Why make reference to mutants if they don't even factor in? It's just half-assedly being "true" to the source material.

MA-MA: Cersei Lannister is the least enjoyable part of the movie. While in Game of Thrones this is because of her well-written and acted yet impossible-to-like character, in Dredd, her character is so ... not... character-y that there is just nothing to work with. In most of her scenes she is just sort of overseeing violence carried out by her lackeys - but we're never given a reason to fear or loathe her. She is an "ex-hooker" and "known for extreme violence" - but in her vague background montage, we never actually SEE her do anything evil! In a way, she cleaned up the Peach Trees mega-structure when she eliminated the rival gangs (all lead by characters whose mugshots suggest they would have made way more interesting villains) and conquered the totally unpoliced building. It's specifically said that Judges rarely come out to Peach Trees. Ma-Ma filled in the void and brought order to the place. Even her appearance is totally halfhearted as she croaks and mutters orders at her ethnically ambiguous drones - she wears absolutely no signifiers of wealth or power. How do you become a drug Queen in postnuclear America without getting some fucking bling, some cool guns, SOMETHING!? Nothing about the direction, photography, script, or performance suggest that Ma-Ma is remotely special in the criminal landscape of Mega-City One. There's no personal connection between her and Dredd, so there's no tension building up to the confrontation with her. It's just a generic conflict between crime and the law and it has no impact.

Nothing says "dangerously violent" like face scars, bedhead, and a maroon tanktop.

Imagine if this had been a grudge match - if Ma-Ma was an infamous Judge-killer, had their uniformed and helmeted corpses strung up and crucified throughout her turf, and that was why nobody answered calls out here anymore. What if Ma-Ma was a significant, and justified, political opponent against the rampant, institutionalized violence that characterizes Mega-City One's psychopath police force? Or, let's get Swiss-cheesy here: what if Ma-Ma had been the one who killed Dredd's ex-partner? Wore his bloodied helmet into battle against him, psychologically tortured him with guilt over his failures? Dredd tells the story of a cop versus a criminal - with just a few scripting changes, it could've been the story of The Cop against The Criminal: politically charged, just as violent, and way, way more intense.

GRIPE 2: ACTION AND PACING.

Towards the end of the first act, Ma-Ma cajoles her computer nerd into hacking building security to lock in the Judges. This is a big moment; innocent people eating their snacks and watching TV look around in confusion as the ceiling closes out sunlight and blast doors drop down to block all entrances - then the power goes out and the whole complex is awash in pure-red emergency lighting. For a fleeting moment, I was so excited by the artistic potential in this - for a movie playfully deconstructing rampant police brutality to run all its action sequences in a relentless palette of black and red - Heck, this even would have set up a few frames to boldly recreate two-tone frames from the original comic, a la Sin City - and yet within seconds, an emergency generator kicks in and natural lighting is instantly restored. This is one of many instances of Dredd ignoring its own potential for intense action.

Dredd weighs itself in as a sci-fi action movie, and while the sci-fi aspects it draws on from its source material are cool as fuck, the action bits are terribly executed. This might be excusable considering the apparently low budget for this film, but I think it just comes down to laziness. There is something that seems not only boring, but bored, about the choreography. For instance, the opening scene features Dredd chasing down a, I guess, hippie van (??) on a busy highway. Trouble is he does only and literally that. The camera cuts back and forth between a shitty van and a "tactical" motorcycle driving in a straight line. They change lanes a few times, but their driving is, overall, nice and safe. Then the van hits a pedestrian, Dredd blows out their tires with motorbike machine-guns, the van flips, and the enemies are mostly dead. Dredd hunts down the remaining survivor to an empty mall, disregards the hostage he's taken, and fires an incendiary round that slowly immolates its way from his mouth through the back of his skull. It's badass that Dredd is so decisive and imperturbable - but at the same time he so rarely does anything interesting. He points and he shoots; it's like he's playing a video-game. Mass murder is routine for Judge Dredd - he even walks Anderson through tactical protocol - but it comes off as totally unimpressive rather than ruthlessly callous, and it actually rings hollow when he literally runs out of bullets when cornered by his rival, Judge Lex. 

The script just doesn't seem to have any grasp on the psychology of tension. In the battle with Lex it's actually difficult to tell Dredd and Lex apart - they have the same helmet, uniform, skintone, and jawline. We don't know who to root for, or who's getting the upper hand until the characters are at a distance from each other. Dredd runs out of ammo and hides behind a pillar, while Lex approaches and delivers a single line that should have been the core conflict of the entire movie; to paraphrase, "this city's a meatgrinder, and us Judges just crank the handle." Lex then fires an armour-piercing round through cement that seriously injures Dredd. And what happens next, right at the critical moment where Dredd must finally prove his worth, going above and beyond protocol, human limitations, and outrageous odds? Anderson walks in from behind and shoots Lex dead. Dredd effortlessly heals his injury and the brush with death is forgotten. Dredd's one moment of weakness is executed in a humourless and anticlimactic way.

"Yes! Stand still and gun him down from a safe distance, my pretties!"

Earlier, there's a showdown with Ma-Ma when she intercepts the Judges as they ascend the Mega-Structure. For some reason, she has three mounted gatling guns, which somehow shoot lasers and yet still chug out spent shells, and uses them to decimate the entirety of the building floor, waggling them around in the general direction of Judge Dredd. She and her gang just stand there, combing back and forth with stationary guns through dozens of feet of Rebar and concrete, while Dredd casually stalks from cover to cover. There's just no tension here at all. After the onslaught, Dredd walks out and faces her from the opposite balcony as she literally stands at her gatling gun, peaceably accepting his confrontation immediately after fully committing to demolishing her home in order to destroy him.

Every sequence in between these highlights is like a bad FPS stage. Pop outfrom a corridor, kill a guy. Continue forward. Hide behind a corner. Kill a few other guys. Snarky comment. Chuck a grenade, then execute the incapacitated. Rinse and repeat. There is no feeling of mounting pressure to succeed. New problems just kind of come up and are quickly dispensed with.

GRIP 3: THE MESSAGE.

Ok. So I'm being hard on Dredd. I know it has lots of fun moments. I know it's just a dumb machismo action flick. But I loved the concept of this movie. I got the impression that the first 15-20 minutes was more dependent on the original comic than the rest, because it so clearly set itself up to be a massive work of satire. The relatable, sensitive, outcast psychic; the blunt-force, dogmatically law-abiding, ultraviolent Dredd himself; the constant foreshadowing that the chaos and violence in the city is the result, not cause, of inequality and state-sanctioned brutality. Without being too cheesy, in order to connect with the audience, the ultimate revelation needed to be that Judge Dredd is completely in the wrong. He's not a hero; he's just a peon, a slave to a system with no regard for the lives of impoverished minorities. Dredd is only in his element among the bloodbath of the action sequences; he depends on violence and crime in order to even exist. This dependence - the dependence of martial law on a perceived enemy - is never explored. The whole mystique of the masked vigilante is the fleshy weakling within -- who is this psychologically broken man? As it is now, the message more or less seems to be "The war on drugs has been a success and some people just aren't up for the job." 

In a setting like Mega-City One, this is a complete waste of an opportunity for a movie that could have been just as fun and violent, but also hilarious, satirical, and critically well-informed.

I GOT 99 PROBLEMS, AND THE WORST ONE IS GRIDLOCK TRAFFIC

After a few hours of Cities, watching traffic flow like this is highly comparable to an intense, psychedelic dream-state.

CITIES: SKYLINES Review.

Simulation games present an interesting design issue: a balance needs to be struck between accurately simulating what the game is supposed to -- building cities, T-boning pimp wagons, following dance steps -- and creating a gratifying play experience. I’ve never actually built a city in my life that wasn’t made out of Lego bricks or D&D character sheets, but I get the impression that Cities: Skylines manages to realize many of the inveterate puzzles of urban planning without turning it into a chore. Indeed, from micro to macro scale, the core design theme in Cities: Skylines seems to be a tightrope-walking, house-of-cards, mixed-metaphor balancing act.

In Cities, your task is to lay down the groundwork for a city that will attract and sustain the largest possible population. The casual passage of time in the game is when the buildings rise up and the traffic flows among the streets, but the real work takes place in hour-long pauses spent masterminding intersections and balancing zones, civic services, and taxes. The transition between the long pause and the resumption of space-time is the moment where you see whether your choices have had any effect. And even as an action RTS gamer, this unremarkable moment brings me incredible satisfaction when I see my plan work out.

These euphoric moments are owed largely to the depth of Cities. Everything is interconnected. Individual civilians have names, jobs, and troubles. Building a network of pedestrian walkways will alleviate commuter traffic. Dead civilians need a hearse to conduct them to the cemetery. Small foibles can add up to crippling frustrations, sometimes to the extent of a plummet in population and income, and the mass destruction of your city by tornado and UFO abduction (actually Cities: Skylines lacks Sim City’s destructive gratifications), and doing the legwork of investigating what’s going wrong, and then tentatively correcting it for the desired result, presents a calming puzzle throughout the development of your city. While a solution may solve your initial problem, all factors are intermingled, and you can cause backswing problems to arise elsewhere in your city. This is especially true when attempting to reroute high-traffic streets - much of the time all you can do is forward traffic to other intersections, rather than eliminate it. As the city sprawls - your citizens will demand more Industrial, Commercial, and Residential zones, which requires connections to the road network, water, electricity, fire and medical coverage, and probably a bunch of other shit - the urban Jenga tower begins to sway further and further from side to side, and those incremental inefficiencies have greater and greater impact.

I think my early experience with the game is accurately conveyed by my save file names...('crazy noobtown', 'grbg???','NewSave'',ooo','real town', 'slightly less crazy' and 'ugh' respectively.

For me personally, difficulty level is hugely influential in my reaction to a game. Challenges need to be solvable without being cursory, and they need to ramp up steadily. With a few exceptions (hello, 90-degree highway merges), all your troubles in Cities will have been caused by you. Each city is first founded on an empty space, and problems only arise as your growing network of infrastructure begins to tie knots in itself. In this way, Cities maintains a caliber of difficulty while still being completely relaxing. There’s no one to blame for any of your problems but yourself; and there’s nothing stopping you from re-paving Spaghetti Junction other than a few minutes of income or an instant loan. Now, don’t get me wrong. When you start Cities, you will fuck up in ways you don’t even understand. I think I founded 7 cities in my first 2-3 hours playing the game, oftentimes running out of budget for water and power before ever unpausing the game. Other times a pandemic will sweep a suburb, killing everyone within weeks. There will be gridlock traffic jams made up of nothing but emergency vehicles and garbage trucks. Sixteen-wheelers will spend hours traversing the aforementioned Spaghetti Junction just to leave the city. And I think everybody, at least once, will place a water pump downstream of the sewage outflow pipe. But the patterns of reasoning the game nudges you towards make no problem unsolvable. With a click you’re able to query map templates to indicate pollution, traffic density, public health, and other factors; you can also query individual civilians and vehicles to find out where they’re going, and if & why it is they’re struggling to get there (This is a task that real-life traffic engineers are sometimes required to do). Thus the problem-solving rubric of diagnose, prescribe, apply seems equally essential in both virtual and actual city management.

I cringe to use the word for a game I’ve enjoyed, but I might hazard that the way Cities highlights real-world problems in an interactive medium, could categorize it as edutainment. I mean, after these long, sexy nights of infrastructure engineering, when I crawl from my lair and cringe at the sunlight, I look around and start recognizing the principles I’ve learned from Cities at work in my actual city. Commercial zones tend to buffer residential from industrial. Highways and roundabouts are spatially inconvenient, but functionally crucial installations in every city. Public transit can cause as much traffic as it’s intended to prevent. Perhaps these are all obvious truths to any driver; but Cities projects into your mind a kind of bird’s-eye view of city networks, makes you aware of why cities are the way they are. Sometimes they’re all sprawled out because, at the time those roads were built, explosive growth in the future had not been anticipated. Other grids, like major downtown urban districts, tend to be densely organized and well serviced. Sometimes the geography itself makes it impossible to keep everything connected and organized. In any case, it just ain’t easy.

I enjoyed Cities for its tasteful difficulty curve, its relaxing gameflow, and its edutainment value. The game's threshold of worthwhileness fluctuated up and down for me over the course of my first few sleepless nights playing it, but there was this one highway intersection that I paused the game to perfect for about 30 minutes, and the feeling of satisfaction following that, about 5 hours into the game, assured me the game was worth the time. I'm pushing 19 hours now and though my city is nothing to boast about, I'm starting to see that growing your city is sorta-kinda more of the same after first few thousand citizens, and my worthwhileness factor is starting to top out a bit. So if you're looking for a fun and bright city-building experience for 5-19 hours, then I would recommend Cities Skylines.

I purchased Cities: Skylines on the Steam Summer Sale (now it's 32.99) and have played 20 hours total, using a few cosmetic mods, as well as an auto-demolisher tool for abandoned and burned-down buildings.