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BILL3'S STRATEGY CUBE

BUSYCITY DELUXE

Feature - William Henderson III

You're The Man With the Master Plan

In the 1960s in the country of Turkey, the ruins of the site of Chatalhoyuk were excavated - one of the oldest human cities yet discovered, now thought to be as much as 9500 years old, and thought to be in active use for over 2000 years. In order for a city to stand the test of time like that, it's going to need some very careful urban planning.

Cities go back for longer than written human history, and yet only for the past 40 years or so have we had interstate highways and suburban sprawl, but they've quickly become deeply entrenched into the established lore of what constitutes urban planning.

Urban planning is a lot more difficult than we give it credit for. I'm sure we've all spent time in a city with something frustrating in it - a traffic snarl that builds up at a particular overpass, or an eye-wateringly noxious rendering plant located a little too close to the local high school. EuroPraxis' BusyCity Deluxe offers you a chance to plan your own city, hopefully without making quite so many mistakes as the designers of your own hometown.

Visuals: SimCity 2000, Eat Your Heart Out

Looking at BusyCity Deluxe's lush SVGA graphics, it's clear that it was very clearly inspired by SimCity 2000 - so much so, in fact, that Maxis' lawyers might be knocking on EuroPraxis' doors with some stern words.

Audio: Spartan and Ambient

In stark contrast to SimCity 2000's bright, bouncy, jazzy soundtrack, BusyCity's music and sound direction is much more relaxed. The game mostly sticks to sound effects, with the game's few musical tracks droning and repetitive.

City Structures

There are a large collection of structures and paths to place in BusyCity Deluxe.

It's the player's job to wind and knot these paths together to create a cohesive city.

No electricity, no water, no civil services. There's barely a financial system under the hood, here. What BusyCity Deluxe wants to focus on is how people get from place to place, and so its structures mostly just represent nodes that people will want to travel to and from. The game is almost entirely in the design of the roads and paths between those nodes.

But you might have to hold your nodes for the next part:

System Requirements

Unfortunately, I have to bring this up, here: the detailed simulation that's happening under the hood is extremely taxing to all but the most modern and expensive equipment.

Its purported minimum requirements are a 486 with 8MB of RAM, but we were unable to make do with less than 16MB of RAM and at least 50MHz under the hood. You'll also need a SoundPounder-compatible sound card and at least 5MB of hard drive space.

That's not the whole story, though.

Simulation Units

A city has tens or hundreds of thousands of people living within it, and adequately simulating transportation networks should call for simulating each of those hundreds of thousands of lives. Where do they come from? Where do they go? Unfortunately, that's a bit too much to ask from for even a mighty Pentium, so instead, BusyCity Deluxe is forced to use tricks that lead designer Rush Hauer says he learned about from real civil engineers - fluid simulations. The people of BusyCity Deluxe flow like a liquid through the streets and train stations, helping to predict where traffic is going to be the absolute worst.

It's an ambitious system, but how does it work?

It Doesn't Work Good: The Simulation Is Hungry for Public Transit

People take up a lot more space in cars, and make a lot more decisions, which causes the simulation to slow to an absolute crawl with even a medium-sized city. If you want to build a big highway interchange, connecting a lot of suburban neighborhoods to your city?

Well, hunker down, because you're going to be watching your whole city at a snail's pace while you wait for your poor CPU. It needs time to very, very gradually work its way through individually ushering each of your suburbanites to their jobs and malls.

The mechanics of bus stops, walking paths, and trains are much more forgiving, however: they can accommodate a lot more of your citizens before slowing down the simulation, which means, in BusyCity's world, they're near-mandatory to build a functioning city.

In my time with BusyCity Deluxe I found that in order to create a city that would actually run on my high-end computer, I needed to create an odd, idiosyncratic place that would barely be identifiable as a city, held together by people giving up on their cars and simply walking to their intended destinations.

I had apartment blocks pressed right up against workplaces and coffee shops, elaborate trams feeding into factories, and bicycles and pedestrian paths everywhere. Honestly, once I stopped thinking of BusyCity as a "City Game" and started thinking of it as a physics toy, I ended up having quite a bit of fun trying to solve the puzzle of how to make my cities work.

Designing cities without cars ends up creating cities that are so alien that they hardly feel like cities at all. At times, BusyCity Deluxe feels more like a theme park simulator than a city simulator.

Conclusion

It's a game about traffic where the cars don't work. Ambitious as it might be, I think it's too flawed to really concretely recommend - although in a few years, with a faster computer, this game might turn out to have been a stroke of genius.

The Chatalhoyuk ruins are thought to be as many as 9500 years old, and even if they went for another 9500 years, BusyCity Deluxe still won't have had enough time to finish simulating my small suburban turnpike.

PROS

• Ambitious design.

• Impressive graphics.

• Building a city is an interesting puzzle.

• Surprisingly livable cities.

CONS

• Sparse, functional sound design.

• Cars don't work.

• Cities feel abstracted from real city design.

SCORE

5.86

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COUNTERPOINT

BusyCity Deluxe was a big topic of conversation among the staff this month. Everyone has an opinion!

Brett Doug: Total snoozefest. Wake me up when you can go on a jägermeister powered spree through the city streets with a shotgun.

Mike Czech: BusyCity Deluxe looks like a graph making love to a city map. If you're not a grognard like Bill, you're not even going to get through the manual.

Trent Contrall: Post-infrastructuralism meets utopian marxism in this fascinating social experiment where capital has no control over the flow of goods and services. Unfortunately, the citizens of my city, Heidelberg II, starved due to a problem with their supply chain.

Riesling Brandt: Forward thinking, certainly, but the computer necessary to run this monstrosity may not be released for another 2-3 months.

Polly Mereyes: It's actually very playable if you read the "recommended tweaks" section of the manual. I reduced the fluid resolution in the game's settings, and ran the game at lower resolution in 256 color mode rather than the game's default. It was smooth as butter. I suspect that this game wasn't initially written for the advanced graphics that shipped.

Haymann Nieschott: I was stuck in traffic on the day that I was supposed to be playing BigCity Deluxe, but I'm told it's quite the game!