The upcoming version of SimCity is beautiful. In this video, one of the producers builds a casino city, explaining why he makes certain choices in roads and other infrastructural elements. Every sim in the game has an agenda -- you can click on a character to find out what they are up to.

Read more in Family at Boing Boing

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

TAGS: family Games Kids

Read these next

Skittles sorting machine, version 3

David LaFerriere's sandwich bag art

knowles

i can’t wait to play this game to kill time on long drives.
- http://twitter.com/mondayjblack Mike Robinson
  
  Good luck with that; it requires an internet connection
  - teapot
    
    Ha!
    
    I love Sim City and was going to put my piracy hat on the hook and shell out for this when it comes out but, with moves like insisting on internet connection, I might just put the hat back on and staple it to my head so I never think of taking it off for EA again.
    
    There are a many games that have this internet connection requirement and many of those end up cracked to override that requirement. Cracked and free on the tubez.
- sweetcraspy
  
  You may be fishing for this, but the new Sim City will require an internet connection to play single player, a la Diablo 3. BoingBoing may want to read up on the DRM scheme.
  
  http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Maxis-Says-Always-DRM-SimCity-Necessary-43465.html
  - semiotix
    
    YOU CAN’T CUT BACK ON OFFLINE PLAY! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!
    
    …huh, no image attached. Oh well. [irateSimCity2000Advisor.jpg]
http://goodsharer.com/ Aloisius

Ooo, nifty. I loved simcity as a kid.
http://twitter.com/mondayjblack Mike Robinson

I love the work they did to make a massive amount of data look trivial
alternatelives

Looks good, but…
I have a real bone to pick with EA, and will likely never buy anything from them again.
Why? They ruined one of my favorite franchises!

C&C – Red Alert 3: Terrible
C&C 4- Tiberian Twilight: Don’t even mention it.
C&C Tiberian Alliances: Free-to-Play? Really?
C&C Generals 2: Planned Free to play, no single player!

The best part: they said they were bringing Generals back to the roots of C&C. Ironically enough, those roots were the single-player campaigns.

Westwood lives in death!
CastanhasDoPara

That looks superb!

Real shame I won’t be playing this until the ass hats at EA get over this “connect to our damn servers every time to play single player” BS.

I mean really, why in the hell would you do that? I’ve always been somewhat interested in multi-player, real-time SimCity with other people but not nearly as much as I am in just plopping down for 8 to 10 hours to build my ideal city far away from the real world.

So in essence, if you are reading this EA, you just lost a long time customer (actually bought every SimCity since the original came out on 3.5 inch firmys with the ‘code sheets’). Thanks so much for punishing me because you fear losing a little money. Also, eventually somebody will crack this and make it available for free. So there’s that too. Your schemes and machinations will only serve to piss off your fan-base (what’s left of it anyway, SimCity Societies was awful, just awful and I still want my money back for that one.)
solitaire

It has always-online DRM and $20 day-one DLC. It has an in-game store (no mods?) and is heavy on the “social gaming”: http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2012/08/simcity_002-610×343.jpg

Boingboing, do you really want to support these practices?
SoKatt

EA is insisting on an always-online only status for Sim City 5. Check out the hordes of unhappy fans at simtropolis.com. Unless your car has a steady WiFi connection you won’t be playing there… EA is in the opinion of a lot of people making a huge mistake with this move.
- teapot
  
  Your comment needs commas :)
LintMan

The game looks good, but it’s a crying shame they’re tyring to turn a classic single player game franchise into an online income scheme. (FYI: EA has announced that all their future games will focus on online play now.) No one who wants to to be able to play their single player games without having to be online and deal with monetization schemes to extract more money from them should buy anything from EA.
http://ae4rv.com/ royaltrux

To this day, Spore (Mac/Win) has less than a 1.5 star rating on Amazon because of the consumer backlash caused by heavy handed DRM. How many sales were lost to that? Would you buy a one star game that you didn’t know a whole lot about?
- http://twitter.com/mondayjblack Mike Robinson
  
  To be fair, it also has a 1.5 star rating because it’s incredibly boring
  - Boundegar
    
    It really is boring. My son and I both played it a little, but it got old fast. To be fair, the DRM is almost invisible. I’ve installed my copy on 3-4 machines, and always play offline. Going online kind of ruins the game: Maxis populated the universe with hundreds of fun-looking critters, but when you connect, the game downloads lots of ugly random creatures that were designed by kids and have named like “penis1234.”
    - ocker3
      
      It almost needs a TV/Movie-like ratings system. I normally play games with obscenity filters off, but something like Spore could really use a way to edit out the millionth penis-monster
jayson

“SimCity is a game about endless choices. Ultimately, you can do whatever you want.”

I wish that were true. Every game of SimCity begins with a vast canvas of possibilities, but before too long, you realize that you’re just trying to figure out what choices the simulation needs you to make to fit its model of what makes a city work.
I’ve always wanted a version that would let me experiment with car-free cities covered in bicycle boulevards, or a Venice-like city crisscrossed by canals, a pastoral shire with walking paths and horses, a future with self-driving cars, or anything else. It seems like each version of SimCity is just the same as the last one, with incremental improvements to the graphics.

Darn.
- joeposts
  
  SimCity Societies had some car-free options. You could build yurts for the hippies and they didn’t need streets. But it was a horrible game and crippled by bugs.
  
  SimCity 4 Deluxe plus the NAM mod lets you build pedestrian malls and paths, but you’re right it’s usually car-centric, even with the many public transportation options.
- http://hgomersall.wordpress.com/ heng
  
  Yeah, it’s US centric city planning circa 1950. Zoned and lots of roads.
  - Jason Baker
    
    Unfortunately, that’s still city planning circa 2012 in much of this country.
BrianPuccio

Since power, water, sewage, etc. all travel by road, there goes the idea of trying to make a mass transit only city. I’d prefer to mico-manage power, water, sewage, etc. and build transit as needed.
dmc10

When I heard about it at E3, was excited, until I heard about the forced connection crap. It’s freakin SimCity people, it’s supposed to a single-player god game. You want to offer multi-player, fine, but by forcing it and your DRM down our throats — you lost another once excited customer.
http://twitter.com/WpgCameraMan Rock Hardwood

Remember when the home-based video game systems got better than the ones at the arcade, and you thought “If I buy this cartridge, I’ll never have to put quarters in a slot again!”
teapot

☑ Pants: Creamed

Gameplay video for upcoming edition of SimCity

Read more in Family at Boing Boing

Read these next