How difficult can organising a music festival be? Oh, right. Well! If you’ve got the moxie despite being woefully underqualified, you can now step up and organise concerts with the latest “mini-expansion” for city-builder Cities: Skylines [official site]. It lets players build festival grounds, host bands, and hopefully not end up with a musical mega-hell. It’s not a deep business simulation but might be a bit of fun to brighten up your city. (more…)

I’ve done a lot of terrible things in my two year quest to ruin as many lives as possible in Cities: Skylines [official site]. I ve allowed the dead to fester in their homes, I ve turned off heating and electricity in the dead of winter, and once, I made an entire city drink its own poo. But with the launch of the Mass Transit expansion, I m turning over a new leaf. Instead of making things worse, I m going to fix my city s awful congestion problems and be hailed a hero of the people.

At least that’s the plan.

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A new expansion for Cities: Skylines [official site], named Mass Transit, has arrived to expand the city-building manage ’em up’s public transport. The expansion adds ferries, monorails, cable cars, and — for those building modernist cities of tomorrow — blimps, along with new transport-y challenges, new policies, new road types, and new canal bits. Aw, it’s not for you. It’s more of a Shelbyville> expansion. … [visit site to read more]

I don’t really ‘get’ driving cars in cities. Having always lived places where I can get everywhere I need by foot, bus, train, or bike, I am bamboozled by city-building games nudging me to build intersections resembling Celtic knots. I’m relieved that Cities: Skylines [official site] will focus on public transport in its next expansion, Mass Transit, which publishers Paradox have announced will launch on May 18th. Mass Transit will bring new forms of public transport, from ferries to whimsically utopian blimps, along with new transit hubs to ease interchanges. Here, have a look at all this in a new trailer: … [visit site to read more]

As long-time readers will know, I don’t believe there’s any possibility of a party unless someone brings a strategy game to the dancefloor. This year, EGX Rezzed is going to be party central. For the first time, Paradox will have a presence at the show, in the form of three playable games (including the just-announced Steel Division: Normandy 44’s multiplayer) and two developer sessions. They’re both on the Friday, with Cities: Skylines up first at 12PM and Stellaris following at 2PM. In the former, you’ll hear Colossal Order’s CEO on continuous development post-release, and working with a large community, and in the latter Stellaris’ game director will talk about the first year post-release, and the major expansion, Utopia.

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Blimps. They re big, they re full of hot air, they re historically prone to crashing to earth in an unstoppable blaze. If you like blimps then we have good news for you. The physical manifestation humankind s hubris can soon be added to your bustling metropolis in Cities: Skylines [official site] as part of the Mass Transit DLC pack, which is also adding ferries, monorails and cable cars. This is so that your commuters can get to work more efficiently. I don t know what right-thinking member of the public would get the 7am zeppelin every morning, but the mayors of Cities: Skylines have never been ones to indulge sensible policies. … [visit site to read more]

This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Cities: Skylines [official site].

Cities: Skylines is a game about building roads. Its lovely set of road-building tools allow you to scribe beautiful curved boulevards into the gentle slopes and combes of virgin lands, and it has inspired 19-page forum topics entitled Show Us Your Interchanges and Steam Workshop lists 24,482 interchange designs.

Oh, and an incidental byproduct of a good road system is the growth of a city around it.

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Cities: Skylines [official site] is one of those games that if given the chance will swallow you whole. Like any simulation game worth its salt, it’s comprised of so many moving parts that only by digging deep into its systems, mechanics and quirks can you hope to scratch its veneer and begin to understand what makes it tick. It’s a wonderful game once you do, but getting there can be a daunting task – even for the most tenacious of players.

User-made mods, of which there are now thousands, make this process a wee bit easier. It’s been the best part of two years since Alec shared his favourites (which are absolutely worth checking out), however the following list gathers the ones I’ve come to find essential in crafting my own homegrown cities and keeping my populace happy.

That last part might be a lie, but I swear that’s not my fault. (It totally is.)

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I’m impressed they waited this long. Using earthquakes and hurricanes to play skyscraper dominoes has long been the alpha and the omega feature of citybuilder games (if you didn’t trash the suburbs with an alien invasion, you weren’t playing Sim City 2000 right). It’s taken Cities: Skylines [official site] 19 months to do the entirely obvious thing, and I’m glad to say it’s done it in style. Its new natural disasters are absolutely terrifying. … [visit site to read more]

Aside from starting a new tradition of unusually-named Steam Awards, Valve have also pulled out their worn and adored bargain bucket and have begun to fill it with games you ll enthusiastically buy and probably never play. Yes, it’s their Autumn Sale. In the streets, the apocalyptic jockeying for TVs and blenders has started. The moon has turned blood red. And I looked and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Black Friday, and sales followed with him. … [visit site to read more]