Building and running a safe and efficient city can be fun, sure. Cities: Skylines [official site] is already great for that. You know what’s also fun? Smashing things. Cities: Skylines is now trying harder with that. Publishers Paradox today announced a new expansion for Colossal Order’s city-builder, named Natural Disasters. Oh yes!
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>
I was certain I was done with city building sims. In fact, I think I thought I was done with sims. Gone was the magic of the classic Sim City 2000, the perfect balance of cartoony mayhem and rude interruptions of graphs. It felt like play, not work, even connecting up the water pipes. The genre disappeared down a hole I wasn’t interested in descending, a terrifying underground world where graphs ruled. And then along came Cities: Skylines, and I was proven wrong.
Paradox Interactive has released a new bit of free Cities: Skylines DLC called Match Day that enables digital mayors to build a football stadium in their cities, attract a team, and then deal with the consequences: The ticket income is sweet, but traffic on game day can be a real headache. The DLC also adds new stadium-related policies, and there's a new hat (and new chirps) for Chirper, too.
The DLC comes alongside a small update that makes a handful of relatively minor fixes and tweaks to the game lowering the amount of power that Solar Plants produce during the night, for instance, and setting snowplow blades to face in the proper direction when using left-hand traffic and also adds five in-game items that had previously been available only to those who had preordered the game: the Carousel, Dog Park, Bouncy Castle, Basketball Court, and Botanical Garden.
The Match Day DLC is live now on Steam, and you can see the full patch notes on the Paradox forums. You can also, since you're here, feast your eyes on a stunning, 50,000-building Cities: Skylines recreation of the city of Seattle, or if you're in the mood for something different, watch 200,000 innocent people get swept away in a deluge of liquid poop.
The PC Gaming Show returns to E3 on Monday June 13, featuring game announcements, updates to existing favourites, and conversation with top developers. You can find out what to expect here, and also book free tickets to attend in person at pcgamingshow.com. The PC Gaming Show will be broadcast live through twitch.tv/pcgamer from 11:30 am PT/2:30 pm ET/6:30 pm GMT, but be sure to tune in beforehand to check out The Steam Speedrun, in which one lucky winner will buy as many games as they can in three minutes.
With Euro 2016 ‘kicking off’ [a technical footballing term meaning ‘throwing a wobbler’ -ballkicking ed.]> tomorrow, Cities: Skylines [official site] has brought football home with a little free DLC. The ‘Match Day’ DLC lets players build a stadium in their city, pick kit colours for their home team, earn a cut of ticket sales, enact stadium-related policies, and – oh god help – try to deal with the increased traffic of match day.
This is accompanied by a new update which gives the city-building game’s pre-order bonus DLC bits to all players. Hello, bouncy castles and botanical gardens!
Intrepid Cities: Skylines player inthoughtwelive has recreated downtown Seattle using 49,152 buildings, at which point the building limit put an end to his architectural dreams. I haven't been to Seattle this could be a replica Mombasa for all I know but Google Maps seems to corroborate things.
Starting with a template by Tanis_2589, inthoughtwelive "redid all the highways, and then eyeballed the rest using Google Earth as a reference". Traffic lights had to be forcibly disabled so as to avoid a traffic jam of apocalyptic proportions.
Seattle residents can attempt to spot their house in the full gallery here.
Okay, so in a situation which rapidly escalated I started off admiring someone’s recreation of Seattle in Cities: Skylines, ended up browsing some of the Steam Workshop mods and assets and am now trying to build a clown retirement community complete with clown cemetery.
Here is the awesome Seattle thing:
