The release of SimCity 5 sparked my interest in a new Railroad Tycoon game. Although Electronic Arts seems to have failed to build a SimCity game that works like I want it to work, their failure was mostly in releasing a game that could then not be played.

Rant

SimCity 5 requires a constant connection to the internet. They say that this is because of the multi-player nature of the game but I have not been able to get the game to run properly to find out how this impacts the play of it. If I create a city in a private region, it’s hard to imagine that other players on the internet or the Maxis/EA servers are needed for anything. They certainly cannot sit there running simulation code for every city or what is the point of having a PC, just for the graphics? But they get what they want because there are players that will buy this no matter what. Heck, I bought a car recently and had to pick the least ugly one I could find since there was nothing that appealed to me. I picked the least crappy item for a car and the least crappy game for a game.

Maybe I’ll write an actual review of SimCity 5 once I can play it. I guess that when everyone else is too disgusted to try to play it, the servers will start working correctly.

Railroading LMO

So the idea is that a railroading game could actually let players work on the same map. They could compete by building competing railroads but some players could decide to be miners (not minors) and just run their mine. The mine would need to be interesting to run just like the railroad is interesting to run. They could make money on their mine and buy up other industries. They could buy stock in the railroads and take over your business in a hostile takeover. It would be just like the most recent version of RRT, Railroads!

The only thing that I really want in a railroading game though is the ability to build things in a realistic manner. Steep hills are avoided at all cost and railroads wind up long river valleys and over ridges to get to their destinations. Time is not nearly as important as fuel cost, except for maybe with passenger operations. I want trains that take more than a few seconds to get to their destinations even at a high simulation speed.

But that’s just me.

[edit]

I just changed the title of this page to Railroading LMO. LMO means Limited Multi-player Online. Games like Battlefield and Call of Duty, just like the new SimCity, are LMO games. SimCity is very limited and players don’t share the same city. BF and COD have player counts up to 64 and have limited surroundings landscapes in which to play.