If you still have money, you maybe build another wind turbine. And then, before you know it, little lightning bolts start flashing over some of your residential housing. So you lay it out, and businesses move in.

Little bars at the bottom of the screen tell you how much demand there is for different kinds of zoning, and when you see that orange bar grow, that means your people want some Industrial Zone space. Yes, two houses are on fire.īut then you'll add clean water, and your city will grow. This is a shot of only one of many very very bad traffic configurations I created in Cities: Skylines. You have to look at your maps and find a place to put them that's windy enough, but they come in smaller units, so the initial cost for the power you need to get started is lower. In Cities: Skylines, you can start with coal - or you can put up wind turbines. Coal plants are dirty, but they'll juice up your town, and they're what you can afford. Back when I used to play Sim City, you were boxed into starting with a coal-fired power plant, which you plunked down in some unfortunate part of your city. When you set up your Cities: Skylines city, it needs power. Let me take you on a tour of a few of these imaginary worlds I've been building and, in some cases, messing up completely, while I hope that my actual world will steady. That's not the case in some of the other games I've been playing. I recently picked it up again after a couple of months off, and my biggest problem was that my animal friends had really missed me. Not a lot of really terrible things can happen very easily it's more that if you don't play, you're not out there earning goodies and catching new bugs. But it's unlike most simulations, in that it's not particularly stressful. But here, I'm referring to the more methodical, world-creating, no-obvious-ending simulations like the farming game Stardew Valley, where you set up your farm and then grow things and sell them and try to make friends. Almost anything can be defined as a simulation of sorts, in that there's always a reality that you're living in, even if you're jumping from platform to platform or shooting at bad guys. (One of my dear friends is a devotee of NBA2K, a game I find as stressful as an ancient version of myself might have found a tiger attack.)īut more than anything, I have been playing simulation games.

I'm okay at Breakfast Bar Tycoon, which requires you to learn how to assemble breakfast sandwiches and serve grumpy customers (though anything where you're eventually rushing stresses me out), and I'm not even going to list the games I've tried at which I'm completely hopeless. I loved Kentucky Route Zero, which is a moody, melancholy point-and-click storytelling game with musical interludes and all kinds of cool stuff.

Yes, I played Animal Crossing: New Horizons when it first came out - in fact, I bought a copy for a stranger on Twitter, because she was in a pinch and it had been such a balm to me.īut I also play RBI Baseball 20 (the official MLB-sanctioned baseball game) and Super Mega Baseball 3 (the funnier, more whimsical baseball game), and I play Paper Mario: The Origami King (the fact that you throw confetti like Rip Taylor in that game is just the best). Maybe it's not a surprise that I, as someone who lives alone and finds myself with time to kill in these Pandemic Days, have made a lot more use of my Switch in the last few months than in the last couple of years.

Planet zoo mobile game