They hate crime, unemployment, pollution (called “germs” for some reason), high taxes, and death. The Sims themselves aren't exceptional as individuals-they live out their ant-farm lives with short memories and clockwork brains, behaving like small children motivated only by immediate desires and immediate discomfort. It shifts the simulation from abstract data-crunching to the visible, real-time interactions of thousands of individual Sims, cars, residences, businesses, factories, and everything else you might find in a city. SimCity does that too, but with a drastically different method. Will Wright's 1989 original and every Maxis-developed SimCity that came after are about the same thing: building and simulating cities. SimCity is the series' greatest technical achievement.
After over a week of building, smashing, and rewiring SimCity's machines to figure out how they work, they still surprise me. They churn through endless feedback loops, feeding Sims into swirling cause and effect eddies that produce money, goods, happiness, and growth.
At their greatest scale, SimCity's cities are self-powering machines with hundreds of thousands of moving parts.
