So I'm noodling this morning with SimCity Societies and cobbling together a "Fun City" which amounts to a bunch of cheery architecturally improbable structures like Clown Schools and Castle Ruins and Creepy Barns, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to lose.
You start with a blank, squarish tract of brown or green turf and plop down power structures and workplaces and homes, add a few courthouses and police boxes, then polish with decorations (statues, parks, memorials) and venues (clubhouses, carnivals, chocolate bunnies). But as long as you keep your societal values in the positive and your homes and workplaces at roughly the same number, you can pretty much slop your way through a half-baked city and win like gangbusters.
You don't need me *sob* You just don't need me...
I guess that's the question, how does developer Tilted Mill define "winning"? Well, aside from the occasional heat wave or flood, or crazy disasters like killer storms, earthquakes, and my personal favorite -- meteor showers -- your goals are mostly reward-related. No missions, no campaigns, no competitive city building (like, whatever its other shortcomings, the well thought out multiplayer modes in Sid Meier's Railroads!). Nope, in SC:S it's all just "win a medal" or "win a medal more than once" or knock out a few achievements (less than a dozen) by meeting X requirements to earn a ho-hum permanent bonus for your future cities. With a single hybrid city, I've already got most of the medals, and I'm just a few bonuses shy of all the achievements.
Kind of disappointing, really (though to be fair, it's very, very cute!).
On losing: Once I had my Fun City up and running with maybe 200-300 Sims and $20k Simoleans I thought what the heck, I'll make my wife pancakes and coffee and leave this thing running for an hour. So after an hour of hearing lots of cheers and happy sighs and giggles and goofy Sim-lish coming from the speakers downstairs, I head back down only to find... Everything. Exactly. The Same. Except for one thing: I now have over $120k in my city's treasury. Woohoo! or just Woohoo?
Apparently you can't really break this game. Not without reaching in with your godly mouse-hand and manually wreaking destruction and dea--well, just destruction vis-a-vis natural disasters, which is kind of fun for a couple seconds. "No Sims were harmed during the course of playing this game," etc., though I have to say, loosing marching columns of grease-painted mimes on your Sims to raise "happiness" always makes it seem like they might be.
Maybe we need a new ESRB rating. How about 'E10-' or 'Everyone Under 10'?
