The future bleeds out from these buildings, gradually seeping into everything around them and - let me be quite clear about this - it often looks bloody fantastic. Roads glow, cars convert and buildings are mottled with solar panels. Every time you drop one of the new structures, whether a humming Academy annex or a simple hydro station, it transforms everything around it into a futuristic reinvention. Perhaps I shouldn't complain.Īnd I often don't, because I'm constantly distracted. Yesterday my community college taught 1,058 students, yet it only has space for 500. Then there was the meteor strike that took out my garbage dump: I never noticed because, even though no garbage was collected for days, even weeks, nobody complained about the mountains of waste all around them. Only a reloading of the city gets them going again. The maglev trains, also a product of the Academy and running hundreds of feet in the air, have a tendency to stop working. Since putting an Academy-granted booster on my solar power station, my power readouts frequently drop to zero. It's an almost psychedelic interpretation of the next century' Maxis has a very green vision of the future.

'SimCity was always a handsome game, but Cities of Tomorrow gives it touches of glory. SimCity has been patched since March and the sims of the next generation seem to have partly got their act together, though the game still suffers regular hiccups and has a new selection of spasms to add to its collection. Everyone who lives in one particular section of one of these gorgeous giants complains about a sewage problem that nobody else suffers from and which, because I can't find it, I can't do anything to solve.Īt least things behave a little more logically back on the ground. Residents on one level seem unable to find the shops on the next. These self-contained cities in the sky call SimCity's launch to mind, because it's not always entirely clear what's going on inside them. These shining spires are constructed level by level, each of which can be residential, commercial or a utility of some sort, before being capped with a park, with solar panels or with a giant, gaudy, glowing advert. Standing proud in the cities of the future are the MegaTowers, buildings not so dissimilar to the out-of-town arcologies. While the two aren't mutually exclusive, they're likely to lead you in one direction or another. OmegaCo is much more concerned with profit and can turn just about everything in your city into a franchise of some sort, but will also use metal and oil to manufacture drones that can help out your city services. The former is like a university for environmentalists and in this verdant venue you will plant the seeds for a cleaner, smarter city, researching wave power, fusion reactors and sewage sanitsers. It features two key additions, The Academy and OmegaCo. Ignoring the problems at ground level is tougher. Creating a stunning skyline is almost effortless. It's a future where technology solves every problem, where bigger is always better and yet where suburban living can still survive, albeit bordered by laser fences. almost.Ĭities of Tomorrow pulls SimCity into a future that lies somewhere between Star Trek and Blade Runner, a glowing fantasy of sleek curves and raging neon.

It's a magnificent vision of the future, and the dystopian indignities it sometimes displays almost add to the charm. It's just so beautiful that I want to forgive it all its trespasses. Sometimes it makes a fool of itself but, though I'm loathe to admit this, I care less than I should. Though it stumbles as it steps towards the future, it is at least heading in the right direction. While SimCity collapsed entirely under scrutiny, its first expansion Cities of Tomorrow merely teeters. Then occasionally, just occasionally, something will knock us out of that daze and we'll realise just how silly the future has turned out. We will be so rapt, so amazed by the omnipresence of progress, that we won't notice that the maglev train has got stuck, that the school bus is circling like a shark, that our friends can't find the shops next door. We will work in buildings that are great sentinels of metal and light. Automated drones will keep us healthy, keep us tidy, even make sure we obey the law. Our homes will be at the top of towers thousands of feet tall, all of them connected by shining bridges that cut through the sky.

In the future, we will all live in a daze, stunned by the technology that will surround us.

Simcity 4 deluxe edition skyscrapers