Stop me if you’ve heard this before That’s always such a strange phrase in the context of a written article. If there’s any fault I can find with Skylines its that it clings to the Sim City formula more than it really needs to. I speak from experience.Īnd that’s why Americans don’t have roundabouts. If you ever escape from that darkened hellhole, you and your vehicle will be flung into a roundabout while confused, angry, scared, and where the slightest error will pull you into a one-way toll road going the wrong direction. And then it pulls you underground where your GPS won’t work, re-labels all the roads, and begins presenting you with branching choices at high speed. The roads are only labeled just enough to trick you into thinking you can navigate with their guidance. In case you’ve never visited: Boston is a mad vortex of devious roads that have been designed to entrap and devour unwary visitors in their hungry tendrils. It only takes a couple of clueless people to ruin the flow of a roundabout, and in any decent-sized city, there’s always going to be a couple of out-of-towners mucking up the works.īut the biggest reason Americans hate roundabouts is that their first (possibly only) experience with them is in New England in the Boston area.
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So when we run into the rare situation where traffic is heavy enough to warrant one and there’s somehow enough room to build one, we still don’t make one because drivers won’t be able to make efficient use of it. Americans don’t build them because the overwhelming majority of us hate them and find them stressful. This creates a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to roundabouts. Like any other aspect of driving, it seems comically simple once you know what you’re doing, but it’s actually really confusing and stressful if you’re not used to it. Second, navigating a roundabout is a skill. By the time a city is large enough where a roundabout would be useful, it’s already too late, because the roads have already been built and the real estate is too expensive to go around bulldozing stuff to make room for a roundabout In Europe, this isn’t a problem because the roundabouts were there centuries before the cars. One is that we’re not packed in the way Europeans are, so we don’t need them as much.
Roundabouts have a bad reputation in the US for a couple of reasons. There’s no cheating here.Ī Long Digression on American vs. Like I said above: Every car is simulated. It’s just a natural emergent result of the way the cars behave. It’s not that the game was written with some kind of pro-roundabout bias. You can take a clogged 4-way intersection and (provided you’ve got enough space) turn it into an effortless free-flowing roundabout. is the best type of intersection for the purposes of keeping traffic flowing, but this game is a perfect illustration of why. I’ve heard that a roundabout They’re often called a “rotary” in New England.
Maybe gathering all these side-streets into one street before you hit the main drag will cut down on the number of traffic lights everyone has to go through. Maybe making this side-street one-way will cut down on the number of people blocking traffic with left-hand turns. Here you can solve congestion problems with a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer. In the old Maxis games, you solved traffic problems by building wider roads or mass transit. Small changes to the street rules can make huge changes to the flow of traffic. Every car is simulated, and you can watch the complex flow of traffic to get a feel for where people are coming from, where they are going, and how you can expedite that. The result is Sim City, but with a really good, really engrossing traffic system. Skylines takes all of that traffic-flow strategy and brings it to a city you design yourself. That game was all about designing mass transit in a fixed city. Cities in Motion is a game about regulating, planning, mitigating, and profiting from traffic.
Skylines is by Colossal Order, the team behind Cities in Motion.
It’s been years since I had a game engrossing enough that I was still playing it in my head while I was trying to fall asleep. When I started playing I thought, “This is the game Simcity 2013 should have been.” After a few hours I thought, “This is better than any Sim City game in recent memory.” At this point I’m thinking it’s probably the best city builder ever designed.
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