Cities: Skylines - 10/20 hours

This time it was garbage.

That's an improvement, though. The garbage backlog is intermittent and hasn't brought my new city to a screeching halt. I've managed to work my way up to about 30,000 citizens and while my streets are a mess, essential services are getting through eventually. I expect I'll peak sooner or later, and then it will become time to do a postmortem on the city, but until that happens, it's nice seeing things grow.

I couldn't have done it without the advice of Victim from the rpg.net forums. The suggestion about roundabouts in particular was a life-saver, although it's hard to know where to put them and I'm reluctant to experiment, given their rather large footprint.

However, I think I need to take things to the next level. Here is my traffic map as of now:

Every street that comes off the highway is slammed with cars. It's not the wall-to-wall gridlock I got with my previous town, but it is a serious problem. I think I'm going to have to bulldoze some of my commercial zones to make room for wider roads, and maybe add another roundabout or two, but my city is growing so well right now that I'm afraid the cure might be worse than the disease.

I think the lesson I'm learning from my time with Cities: Skylines is to be content with small victories. On one level, it really is better to govern a small town well than to have a large city and barely be able to control it.

On the other hand, it's kind of thrilling to reach the various milestones and watch your city get bigger and bigger. I'm just finding that the complexity of the game is exploding faster than I can get a grip on it.

Of course, this is always the way it goes down when you try to learn a new, complex strategy game. I must have played a dozen games of Civilization V before I felt confident taking on Prince difficulty and then I played Prince for literally hundreds of hours before moving on to King (and then I tried going after Emperor right away and it was a disaster). So it's likely that if I kept at it and played Cities: Skylines on a bunch of different maps over the course of a year or two,  I would com to view traffic management as a minor annoyance to be cleared away with a few clever exploits of the simulation logic.

But who has that sort of time?

Cities: Skylines - 6/20 hours

Well, I did it again. Luckily, there were no deaths this time, but once more my ineptitude with traffic planning led to disaster in my small town. Massive power outages struck without warning thanks to a lack of fuel for my power plants. The trucks that were supposed to deliver the oil and coal managed to get stuck in gridlock for days (the game is very abstract about the passage of time).

I thought for sure this time I had it figured out. When traffic got bad, I bulldozed my two-lane road (and, unfortunately, a large chunk of my commercial district, and replaced it with a four-lane road. But that proved to be only a temporary stopgap. It turned out that most of the gridlock was due to cars going south and that the north lanes were barely being used. So I tore up the road again and replaced it with a one-way street and a two-lane road. But that just shifted the congestion down to the south as various cars got stuck having to divert around my one-way street and subsequently clogged up residential roads that were not meant to handle the congestion.


I think, on balance, things were getting better - the blackouts even stopped temporarily - but as my city grew, the problems came back with a vengeance and I wound up with power outages over about a third of the town.

From where I'm standing, the problem of controlling traffic is starting to look like it may be beyond my capabilities. It's difficult to see the connections between cause and effect, and nothing in my experience has helped me develop an intuition for the sort of solutions the game is expecting of me.

The only thing I can do is commit to a painful series of experiments where I learn through trial and error what works and what doesn't. It looks like a third new city is in the works. Here's hoping this one teaches me something useful.

Cities: Skylines - 3/20 hours

I am a terrible mayor. In my first city, people started dying left and right and nothing I did seemed to stem the tide. Bodies were piling up in residential houses as both my budget and my population suddenly crashed.

As near as I can figure, the problem appears to be that my medical clinic and/or cemetery was in an inconvenient location and the resulting traffic kept people from using them effectively.

Fucking traffic.

That was the part of SimCity 4 I couldn't quite figure out. And now it's returned to make my life miserable once again. I've managed to stay ahead of a healthcare collapse by proactively building a lot of medical clinics and multiple cemeteries, but looking at my traffic grid, I haven't actually solved the problem.

I really should figure this out. It's the sort of engaging, technical problem that thoroughly intrigues me in real life. The issue I have in games is that I don't like tearing things down to make room for wider roads or transit buildings. It's silly, I know. Logically, selective destruction has always been a necessary part of creation, but I guess I feel guilty for knocking down these virtual neighborhoods. Maybe it's because I've seen too many movies where the villain was an evil land developer.

It's probably vain puffery at this point, but I've decided that my mission for the next 17 hours is to finally figure out simulated video game traffic and build a city with a functional transportation infrastructure. It will be my greatest challenge yet!

(I mean, granted, it's not as sexy a pitch as "repelling the alien menace" or "surviving the post-apocalyptic wasteland," but it's the sort of thing that both excites and intimidates me).

Cities: Skylines - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Cities: Skylines is a modern take on the classic city simulation. The game introduces new game play elements to realize the thrill and hardships of creating and maintaining a real city whilst expanding on some well-established tropes of the city building experience.
 
From the makers of the Cities in Motion franchise, the game boasts a fully realized transport system. It also includes the ability to mod the game to suit your play style as a fine counter balance to the layered and challenging simulation. You’re only limited by your imagination, so take control and reach for the sky! 

Previous Playtime

18 minutes

Expectations and Prior Experience

My friend Daniel got this game for me around the time I was playing SimCity 4 and so I fired it up to check out the differences between the games. I didn't actually get that much of a read on it, just playing for a few minutes, but it looked to me as if Cities: Skylines owed a lot to the SimCity franchise, but decided to go in a more hardcore detail-oriented direction. I remember most of those 18 minutes involved fiddling with sewer pipes.

Which means that Cities: Skylines is probably exactly my sort of thing. My only worry is that it might have too steep a learning curve and subsequently I'll have a lot of failed cities and no functional ones to show for my 20 hours.

It's probably not worth stressing out about, though. This is a city sim, which means that success and failure are long-term and subjective. If nothing else, I can simply take what I have at the end of all this and declare it a success.

One Finger Death Punch - 20/20 hours

I powered through my last three hours, and it wasn't so bad . . . except that my brain is now mush. I keep wanting to react to things, but the quiet of the hotel at night is not the sort of environment where fast reflexes offer any sort of advantage.

What's left to say about One Finger Death Punch at this point? I was often surprised at myself while playing this game. I thought for sure that I couldn't beat a particular level and with all but three exceptions, I was wrong (and it's debatable whether I'm wrong permanently, even with those).

That's a good feeling, though I must have a serious pessimistic streak because I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was afraid that I'd hit a wall and be forced to just grind on to pad my time, but luckily that never happened.

I think I will remember this game fondly, but I don't think I'll play it again. It's well put together and it manages to strike the perfect balance between the simplicity of its basic idea and the depth of skill and knowledge necessary to play it well. However, it requires entering a state of consciousness that simply isn't very comfortable. Maybe there will be times when I want to narrow my focus and until time is sliced thin and there's no separation between my thought and my actions, but if so I already have Tetris for that.

In the end, I really liked One Finger Death Punch. The goofy martial-arts nerdery of its presentation combined with the relentless, but fair, pace of its action made it an experience unlike any other. I really couldn't ask for anything more from a casual indie game.

One Finger Death Punch - 16/20 hours

It is the paradox of One Finger Death Punch that the more difficult it gets the better the game it becomes and the less time I can stand to play at a stretch. When enemies are flying at your left and right as fast as you can see and you get into the zone where your fingers dance and your clicks fall into a perfect rhythm, it's an intense experience, one that leaves me breathless. I need time to cool down between attempts.

But it's astonishing to learn that you are capable of things you once thought impossible. It took me the better part of an hour to get past the final light sword round in Student mode, and for much of that hour, I was convinced that I would never reach the Master levels.

What wound up happening is that I burned out on the last few Student levels so I decided I would  cool off by replaying some early levels to try for platinum medals. Unfortunately, One Finger Death Punch has an annoying mechanic where the more you win, the higher the game's speed, so after just a few medals, I was back where I started from.

Since the only way to reduce your speed multiplier is to fail levels, I decided that it would be just as well if I failed the last few levels which were giving me trouble. Anyway, it turned out that during one of these doomed attempts, I didn't actually fail (probably due to all that practice I got playing the level at 150% speed), and that's how I managed to beat Student-level difficulty.

After that, I was kind of lost for awhile. I decided to give Survival mode a try, and that's a nice way to kill 15 minutes, but I wouldn't want to sit and do it for hours at a time. In the course of playing Survival mode, I unlocked Blind Survival mode, which is just like regular Survival mode, except you don't have the handy little UI elements that tell you when it's safe to strike.

Blind Survival mode is probably the best way to play the game. In the normal course of events, it's usually much more efficient to pay attention to the colored bars and ignore everything but the general position and movement of your enemies. Which is a shame because One Finger Death Punch has some really fun animation (stick figure Drunken Fist is adorable). With the bars gone, you're not only allowed, but forced to watch the martial arts action directly, and it just feels like a purer and more entertaining form of the game.

If you succeed at Blind Survival Mode well enough to get 500 kills, you unlock the game's final play mode - No, Luca, No Survival mode. This is just like regular survival except at random intervals a picture of a black cat appears on the screen and you have to swipe it away with a movement of your mouse. It's utterly ridiculous and I can't imagine I'll ever play it again, as the novelty wore off almost immediately.

It's still  a realistic depiction of a cat, though.

The plan for the last four hours is to just take it easy and do whatever comes to mind at any given moment. It's funny, if I were playing this game for a half-hour a day for forty days, it would be the easiest thing in the world, but marathoning it in the space of a week is going to take everything I've got.

One Finger Death Punch - 12/20 hours

When I first learned that people could get too old to compete in e-sports, I was surprised. I figured the activity wasn't too strenuous and relied more on the mind than the body and thus young people would not have any significant advantage.

One Finger Death Punch is teaching me the error of my ways. It feels like these most recent levels have been pushing me to my physical limit. I actually had to stop my last session because my fingers were too weak to push the buttons quickly enough.

It was a real thrill to overcome the game's second-to-last lightsaber level. I literally shouted in triumph when I managed to squeak through with one hit point remaining. However, the experience of getting to that point was torture. At one point, the enemies were coming so fast I barely had time to register them before I had to click. My 34-year-old reaction time is simply not spry enough to keep up with the upper levels of this game (I mean, I did beat the level, but luck had a lot to do with it).

I'm still going to try and unlock master mode, but I don't anticipate that being a fruitful way to spend my remaining eight hours with the game. It might be better for me to go back and replay some of the easier levels in the hopes of getting some more platinum medals. Alternately, I can try survival mode. The advantage to that would be the lack of a definite failure state. My only benchmark for success will be my previous performance.

Either way, I think I'll have no trouble getting to the end of this game . . . as soon as my hand has some time to rest.