Screenshot from 'SimCity E3 Gameplay Trailer'. Photo: AFP
Turns out that when rush hour is cranked up to 11, commuters have a hard time getting
from home to work and back when their main route is the fretboard of a classic axe. Lesson learned.
SimCity producer Ocean Quigley also takes viewers through some of the choices that players will face when commanding a power-intensive conurbation. Will they choose to go green with a wind farm, plunge mine shafts into coal seams, perform dentistry on the earth's crust for oil, or go nuclear without going nuclear? Should spare energy be sold back to the grid or shared with those around? And what about crime -- will clamping down really be as simple as putting more bobbies on the beat?
By the time the unnumbered SimCity rolls around during March's first week, 2013, it will have been ten years since SimCity 4 was first made available.
In the intervening years, Tropico has established itself as a quirky benevolent dictatorship sim with legs, urban construction game City Life became the Cities XL series, and Minecraft encouraged players to get close and personal with their blocky construction projects, while the second project from independent studio Gaslamp Games will be a steampunk-style city builder called Clockwork Empires, also due 2013.