By Kieron Gillen on April 15th, 2010 at 3:49 pm.
This chap is better than you at Sim City 3000.
Okay, I’m assuming he’s a chap. But, really, this screams bloke, in the same way that the vast majority of serial killers are geezers.
Awesome. Also includes great dialogue for a sort of monomanical superhero comic. For example…
GEOMETRY INSPIRED BY THE WHEEL OF LIFE AND DEATH!
MICROMANAGEMENT FOR ABSOLUTE PERFECTION!
LIBRARIES TO MAXIMISE RESIDENTIAL POTENTIAL!
Exactly.
Thanks to Poisoned Sponge for telling us about this. No thanks to Dubble for not telling us about this. And a special firm, manly handshake for anyone who can identify the music it uses. The stuff from 2:30 onwards, if it’s two pieces or something.
I have seen the dystopian future.
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my eye’s … they bleed
/whimper
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that was… bizarre. I do not know how to describe it.
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cant help but feel 90% of the dwarf mega-fortresses trump this for sheer OMGWTF ocd-levels-of-patience
but not being a massive simcity fan, im probably not seeing the acheivement here, other than a pretty quilt pattern
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It looks like he’s tried to work out the most efficient form to use for the city by the rules of the game.
I too feel that FlareChannel, for example, is more impressive.
I also think that this is a bit sad. It’s not what gaming is about for me, in fact it is something like the opposite of what gaming is to me. But whatever, each to their own.
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Truly, if this guy starts to play DF…his family will never see him again.
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Someone recently built a working programmable 8-bit computer in Dwarf Fortress completely out of gears, pressure-plates, pumps, and switches:
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=49641.0
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Sweet! Back before I lost interest in DF, I’d been drawing up plans for water-based logic gates; I’m surprised someone actually successfully made a computer.
Clearly, therefore, DF is Turing-complete and will eventually take over the world.
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If someone implements DF in DF, does the world end?
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@DrazharLn,
This guy has taken the concept of “min-maxing” to the next level. For some people this is what is fun, breaking down the game so they can absolutely maximize their “build”, be it in an MMO, an RPG, FPS, etc. I’m a bit of a Min-Maxer myself, but nothing on the level of this fellow… however I can see how perfecting his grids to the max can be fun for him. I do the same thing in MMO’s and RPG’s, but not to this extent.
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What… a dude has implemented a computer …in a roguelike game?!… *HEAD IMPLODE*
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“But whatever, each to their own.”
A vacuous statement once you have already labelled him “sad”.
I love obsessives.
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I’ll disagree with the “not about gaming anymore” statement.
It’s min-maxing! I love doing it. There’s whole fora just to help you calculate if that weapon of überness you found that has 2 hit more but 1 ap & 1 crit less is a good replacement for your WoW warrior.
Some people just enjoy getting the best out of their games.
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That’s really “for given value of ‘best’”, in a big way…
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That 8bit computer made in DF deserves a post of its own. Much more interesting than min-maxing SimCity 3000…
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Speaking of DF, someone also made a working calculator.
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/User:BaronW
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I have never played SimCity 3000, nor do I ever need to now that he has beaten it and I have seen the video. There is nothing that anyone can accomplish that this insane creator hasn’t.
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Of course, RogB is correct. This guy needs to move to Dwarf Fortress, except that thing is constantly under revision.
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Not seeing the level of achievement you say? There is probably more work here than most bachelors degrees from my experience with the game
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I have the feeling that someone should probably give him a degree for this. If only he worked for the city council, we might have a half decent parking scheme. Someone should actually tell him he could make a lot of money as a cityworks consultant, he be better than most, for a start he might know what to do.
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Lack_26 you may not have noticed, but he has zero roads in his cities, so optimized car parking is kind of pointless. As far as I can tell there is a subway station at every street corner and he is utterly dependant on deals off map to supply energy, water and manage waste, you’d have to wonder what kind of world this megacity lives in.
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Yeah I noticed that, still reckon he could do a better job than my council. (Mind you, a kid with a crayon could probably do better than the council).
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@ Yargh
“he is utterly dependant on deals off map to supply energy, water and manage waste, you’d have to wonder what kind of world this megacity lives in.”
You’ve just described the West’s existence.
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Crikey.
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Pretty amazing stuff, that is for sure…
Also, for the music, I am pretty sure it is by Jesper Kyd and is off of the Hitman: Blood Money soundtrack. Sorry I can’t be more specific as to which track (possibly Hunter or Apocalypse), but I have not listened to that soundtrack in quite a while…
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@Andrew:
It is Apocalypse.
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The main song is that, yeah. The bit at the very beginning of the video is the beginning of Menouthis by E.S. Posthumus.
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Worth noting (maybe??) that the song seems to be a remix/retake of Kyd’s stage 1 track from Amok, “Progress”
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@Mortis: Now here’s a man who knows his game soundtrack history. Kudos. (I was frankly always more fond of Progress than Apocalypse – maybe just because I heard Progress first.)
But what surprises me is that Kieron didn’t recognize it – it is, after all, the most famous bit of music in the Hitman franchise, which was always known for its soundtracks. Also Kyd noted that it’s a favorite melody of his (that’s why he reused it, after all).
But, as ever, the RPS community springs forth with factoids on the ready. And you all do it before me, so I don’t get to impress anyone with my own reams of useless trivia. Curse you all.
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A stunning piece of Outsider art.
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Congratulations for spending two years in building a city that is both perfect (according to the SimCity design architecture), unrealistic (in the sense that it would never be actually built) and uninhabitable (in the sense that no one would ever want to live there).
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That is fucking terrifying. If Will Wright saw this it would go something along the lines of “OH MY GOD…YOU REALLY DID IT… GOD DAMN YOU… DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL”. Something like that.
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Cool! Although, I really feel he should have done something like that with Simcity 4. It has a much for developed custom content ecosystem and total regional populations could way higher.
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Seeing how this is obviously a math geek, I’m awaiting his proof that this city is indeed optimal, as he claims it is.
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Agreed. That chap is certainly better at Sim City 3000 than me. And math.
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And that’s how you play a video game (narrated by Ron Howard).
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lolcore
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PLANS STARTED IN 2006.
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The music sounds rather like Philip Glass, which would fit since the guy references Koyaanisqatsi.
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yaaay, more quirky decade old game youtubage!
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ah so hes kind of reverse engineered how the game see’s a perfect layout. okay thats quite dedicated, fair enough. seems like it’d take all the fun out of it though!.
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@RogB
The fun is figuring it out, obviously. I’m nowhere near dedicated enough or obsessive enough to do something like this, but it’s not hard for me to understand the appeal. It’s an optimization problem and the author is a natural tinkerer, he’s the kind of guy that used to take his toys apart to see how they work.
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I did something like this with archeology buildings in Sim City 2000.
..prepare for the pun… 1000 years ago.
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If he was a real man, he’d then unleash volcanoes and meteors on it, like Maxis clearly intended.
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Music from Hitman Blood Money – composed by Jesper Kyd
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I don’t even…. what is…
ZERO WATER POLLUTION
NO CHEAT
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Perhaps something to do with the zero water production? It’s all being supplied by neighboring cities.
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That city screams for a visit from Godzilla (or wathever great disaster simcity3k had)
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Asperger Syndrome
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It’s nice to be reminded from time to time of the fact that I’m a sane person.
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I recognize some of the music from Hitman: Blood Money. Do I get a handshake?
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Congratulations on “solving” SimCity 3000. Will Wright probably shed a tear of joy. :)
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Hmmm, I had a city of several millions (can’t remember the exact number) in simcity 2000, but it was mainly a chaotic field of archologies (little buildings that looked like spacecrafts and could store dozens of thousands of inhabitants) surrounded by cop stations.
A very impressive achievement, albeit depicted in an overly dramatic and pompous video.
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Hitman music ain’t it? At least it’s featured in the games. The part 2 music is the chase music used in at least one of the games.
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I have to applaud that for the err totality of his solution to the challenges of the game. To be honest I always had the most fun with SC when I was on the edge. Creating a productive good society when a disaster hit etc. I remember getting SC2000 very fondly. It was a christmas present from my parents when I was staying in wales with my grandmother. It was on the Amiga and not being able to take said machine with me I had almost a week post christmas to pour over that manual and it’s contents before playing the game. I became obsessed before even putting the disk into the drive. :) I’ve never quite understood why since then (being 17 at the time) but I’ve called every first SC town since leamington spa.
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All the “Randomsanti derives from the word…” stuff would work rather better if the “dictionary entry” for cheating was less wrong.
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Music from Hitman – I’ll have my handjob now.
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The music is “Apocalypse” from the Hitman Blood Money soundtrack. ‘Tis to be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gOP5ha3I3g
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I can’t help feeling that someone who would do this would be the kind of person to build the Cybermen to get rid of all those pesky emotions and things, it’s clearly the optimum solution.
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I winder if this guy could try his hand at city planning. It would be interesting, to say the least.
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This is the Kayonisquatsi of sim city, isn’t it?
The music, the explanation… the, the drawings.
great stuff!
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I think maybe its the sign of a true, classic game this.
Sometimes it takes someone’s fanatical patience or skill to take a game as far as it’ll go, things like this and Hondo’s AHL maps that were blogged recently make their respective games all the more wonderful.
plus it has that ‘CRAZY’ vibe which I love.
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I’m glad this man is allowed to further the human gene pool.
Yes. He hasn’t wasted his life AT ALL!
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That’s just what I was thinking. Non gamers see this and go “Imagine what he could have done if he applied that to something worthwhile.”
Sadly I feel the same way.
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this is beautiful and wrong at the same time
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Looks like the place to live when our cereal packets have games on them and we upload our highscores for tax breaks.
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There’s no other way to put it: SimCity 3000 has been completed, comprehensively beaten.
The cost? One human life, hideously damaged, beyond all repair. A gaming martyr of sorts, no?
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Wow, is this like a Children of the Corn* city or something? What’s going on at 6:40:? No one in the city is over age 55?!?
Everything was pretty creepy dystopian even before I saw that. Is there an old people disposal system somewhere, or is that licensed to a neighbor also?
You just know someone is going to rebel agains the 55 age limit and bring the whole thing crashing down …
*There’s a better example, but I can’t remember the name.
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…Logans Run?
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Logan’s Run?
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Yep. I kep thinking “Loderunner”, lulz.
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yeah, I thought Logan’s Run at first too.
Then I thought about it. At age 55, after a nice life in the cities, they get shipped to the slave cities supplying the utilities, polluting the water, air and earth. They’re all dead of cancer by age 65.
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He specifically references Koyaanisqatsi which from the wikipedia article:
I agree with most people that this is just applied OCD, but it also seems like a city that is deliberately channelling the theme of the film it is inspired by, not just the art direction. I think the put-downs going around are a bit misplaced. Somebody who directly tries to reference Kowloon Walled City isn’t a complete back-birth, though in this I am somewhat biased.
Final wrap-up: The comments aghast at the nature of the city, who would possibly want to live there, etc. are spot on, and perhaps DELIBERATELY incited by the author. He is either very singularly focused or sees that “MICROMANAGEMENT FOR ABSOLUTE PERFECTION!” has inherent irony when applied to the organisation of society.
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Hire this man to work on the UK’s motorway layouts. Actually hire him for anything, he obviously has far too much free time on his hands.
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I’d like to see what he could do with spaghetti junction.
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I installed this last night and had 12 million before I went to bed.
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Is it weird that I have this overwhelming urge to find this guy and dump his books?
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Speaking of which when the hell is Maxis going to make a real SimCity 5????
(yay! I got to be the first to say it in a thread!)
8)
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hmkay.
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…God of War soundtrack?
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Ozymandias
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I love that poem. The excerpt in Civ4 is also an excellent use.
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Oh, it’s also misquoted here. Look on my (his) works, ye Mighty, and despair, would be right.
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JonFitt: Do I honestly have to explain why I wrote what I did rather than the actual quote?
KG
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It must be great to be one of those 10 unemployed people of Magnasanti. I guess they are like celebrities and stuff and live inside an endless Big Brother show…
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He either understands the game better than anyone ever or has completely missed the entire point of the game.
Both answers horrify me.
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I think this guys smoked the Voynich Manuscript when he was coming up with the plans for this. Also, did anyone notice that his cities apparently took upwards of 50,000 in-game years to complete?
And I know the music has been identified, but it really sounds like what would have happened if Philip Glass did the soundtrack for God of War.
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I’ll just be over at the corner over there… working on my math class things and feeling stupidly inferior…
PS: Do not let this person near CERN, his plans resemble a death-ray far too much already.
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This is basically what urban planning is.
He should do a degree in it and submit this as his thesis.
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Frank Lloyd Wright is rolling in his grave.
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Lots of sour grapes from the commenters, ey. I love the irony of people on RPS calling someone out as a nerdy videogame obsessive!
FWIW I think this is a pretty amazing achievement, if it is indeed optimal then he’s completed a game that wasn’t really supposed to have an end.
All people who excel are obsessive, in sport, science or whatever. That doesn’t take away from how cool this is. I’d like to see what he can do in Minecraft.
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Agreed. It made me think about win states for other games with “no end”. Eve could be completely conquered, for example, with all resources being maximally exploited. (Mathematically perfect moon mining chains across the tens of thousands of moons, etc.)
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the difference is the people who are obsessed with sports and science get jobs while the people who obsess over video games spend all their times huddled in their house pushing buttons and occasionally waddling to the fridge with their atrophied legs.
not allot of places are looking to hire a video game expert.
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He’s clearly more than just a video game expert, if all he did was this game he’d have done it quicker than over the span of several years, from the dates and times given, I’d imagine this was a personal hobby more than the only thing he does. His maths are sound and execution brilliant. He could well be a mathematician professionally and wanted this challenge.
As the OP of the post said, it’s a said irony us of all people try and call other gamers sad when we no doubt play games for more hours a week than this guy does. Also, cut the stereotypes, it does yourself and the rest of us a disservice.
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Fucking nerd. Btw the Dwarf Fortress computer is really just a step too far, but it makes me want to play (and understand) that bloody game!
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Someone had to…
(Snipped from wiki)
This sonnet is often incorrectly quoted or reproduced. The most common misquotation – “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” – replaces the correct “on” with “upon”, thus turning the regular decasyllabic (iambic pentameter) verse into an 11-syllable line.
Please don’t hate me
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I assume he achieved the zero crime rate by having his cultists sacrifice all criminals to his blood-stained altars? :) If this guy ever got elected into office (or, as is more likely, he concocted an elaborate, diabolical scheme to get himself into a position of absolute power, no doubt while chuckling maniacally and doing a fingertip-pyramid) then we’d all end up living in the Borg Collective by 2020.
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Cultists? Probably genetically modified transhuman police officers that move between the buildings in a perfect grid, all day, every day. He’s way too efficient for cultists :)
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I can recognize the impressive achievement, but couldn’t he have made the video a bit more interesting? I got kind of bored by the full map-views which in effect only showed a blurry isometric square.
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Quite an accomplishment. NOW UNLEASH THE EARTHQUAKES AND UFO ATTACKS!
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Good God. I’m not ashamed to admit that while watching this, I was actually slightly terrified by the levels of efficiency and perfection shown here. His land value is a perfect gradient from good to bad, radiating outwards. Not a single tile is unused. It’s like something that could only exist in the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus. Also, it took 48,000 years for that city to be built. Yes, this chap is better at SC3K than me.
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Huh, I wonder where those italics came from.
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48,000 years? Well I suppose our planet could be that efficient and…German in 48,000 years.
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I feel offended by this! Excuse me now, I have to get my uniform to go shopping!
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The part one music fucking horrifies me.
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Specifically, that piece is used in the Opera level.
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I have to admit, when some of the statements flashed up, I half expected the video to cut to Garrett saying something droll about Mechanists.
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Was I the only one who expected the end of the video to be a space monster walking through the middle of the town blowing everything up?
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This vaguely reminds me of Time Cube
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Anyone else felt like he was feeding us subliminal messages to murder the entire household? No?…
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OK but what is that ugly pixelated square thing that dominates most of the video?
I have never played Sim City. I guess I am a bit surprised it isn’t more like, you know, a city.
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Love this stuff, I swear I will vote whatever politician who shouts: LIBRARIES TO MAXIMISE RESIDENTIAL POTENTIAL! in prime time among the list of wonderfult things he will do for us.
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Unimpressed. Achieve similar aesthetics with Sim City Societies and I’ll tip my hat.
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It’s the attack music from Hitman: Blood Money, innit?
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@Tei:
Building a basic computer is usually the first thing anyone does in games where it is even remotly possible. Some guy did it in Little Big Planet and even in Conway’s Game of Life.
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Well that was fucking terrifying
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This person is insane.
Can you imagine living in a city like that?
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Pantsman: Been to Manhattan or Tokyo?
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Well I live in Manhattan and I can tell you it is exactly like Magnasanti. I’m not even sure why you guys are so impressed by this guy’s accomplishments. I mean, all he had to do was look out my window and he’d know exactly the most efficient grid zoning pattern.
I do wish we had room for roads though …
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I confess it disturbed me a little. I know for a fact I could never play a game to to this extent. Even my most beloved titles.
On one hand I have to admire his dedication, obvious intelligence and impressive skills. But on the other hand, I hope for his sake this is simply someone using some of his spare time trying to build something impressive, and not a display of obsession.
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Most of the people in this thread are stupid.
In perfect honesty I cannot say how this alters my perception and theory of the video game. It either strengthens it or obliterates it.
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Awesome. SC3k is my favourite of the series. Time to go boot the laptop and have another look I think….
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And he did it all without arcologies too, did he not?
I guess it’s fairly obvious they’re enormous wastes of space and resources (as the futurist world has kinda worked out already). But they’re so cool!
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They didn’t include arcologies in SC3K. :)
Also, the thing this reminds me of the most are the documentary discs from the Blade Runner Final Cut. All the sheets full of guesses and geometric abstractions.
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Wow… I can’t describe how amazed by this I am. Its this sort of person, with the obsessive attention to detail that makes this world so wonderful. I guarantee Newton, the Wright Brothers and Watt were all like this.
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Except, y’know, they actually achieved things.
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well of course, I just mean I love the obsessive tinkerers of our race, god knows i’m not one
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To be completely honest, all this reminds me of is the passage from Good Omens, where it is revealed that Crowley has planned the London Orbital Motorway in such a way as to resemble a sigil that means “Hail Satan, Lord of Darkness”.
You even have the ominous chanting!
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Because you mentioned Good Omens, I like you already.
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Seven days…
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I believe a layout made of tesselated timecubes is 11% more efficient.
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ITT: lots of folks who are insecure about the amount of video games that they play attacking somebody for playing a little bit more.
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ITT: nerds ostracized in high school unwilling to ostracize others. see: furries and zoophiles, anime and paedophiles, tabletop gamers and really stinky women-hating non-bathing non-shaving hambeasts with no social skills who smell like cat pee.
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Fantastic stuff to be sure, but it begs the question: What would happen if this guy tried to make the make the worst city possible?
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I refuse to play anything with Comic Sans as a font.
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There was something terrifying about that video.
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ulillillia is a better gamer and he has the OCD to prove it.
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I think Jane Mcgonigals point about this would be that the guy has learned a great deal of things from doing this project, things he could never have learned outside of gaming – and that rather than his “potential” now being lost from the world, we instead need to model society so that is able to make use of the kinds of skills he has learned.
Of course you can take the negative viewpoint “if video games didn’t exist, this kind of person would be helping fix the world” but it’s far from a certain thing. He’s probably not that interested in saving the world. He just really liked SimCity when he was younger.
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Above post: In reply to whoever feels like the guy has “wasted his life.”
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I wish to download this city and destroy it with riots and tornado’s.
what? that’s the point of sim city isn’t it?!?!
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I’m not that experienced in Sim City, but is it me or are there no one in Magnasanti above the age of 55? Are they all liquefied as fuel when they reach an “inefficient” age group? =P The stats page in the last part of the video has some disturbing facts at least. =O
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I don’t know the name of the piece from 2-30 on, but it sounds a lot like it’s from that film he mentioned, Koyaanitsqatsi.
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The creator’s going to have a real shock when he next logs into YouTube. He posted this back in January and it had about 700 views before yesterday, now it’s heading towards having that many comments alone, and over 180’000 views at time of writing.
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@Roadrunnerr
Yeah, just like all those idiots who spend their lives smearing coloured goo around a piece of fabric stretched tight around a wooden frame, those fools who write words about stuff that *never actually happened*, and people who make strange noises with metal, wood, and plastic contraptions!
We’d be much better off if he got a job in a box factory.
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As a big SC fan I salute this guy. I would love to see the same thing in SimCity 4, but I could imagine it being a lot harder in that game (since you need to run the neighbouring cities yourself and can’t just dump everything “bad” there as easily).
I think my biggest sc3k city was about 1,5 million, and it was pretty aesthetically pleasing as well unlike this beast ;)
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Some somebody beat Sim City 3000, then?
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The achievement of the city planning aside, I gotta say the video itself is nicely put together.
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What is this guy’s name? Aldous Huxely? Outsourced labor ftw
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I feel sorry for his girlfriend.
And yes, he clearly has a girlfriend. With balls that mathematical, no educated woman could resist.
As for him wasting his time – I know a guy who’s doing a Maths PhD at Cambridge, he literally does not stop thinking about maths. He’ll be shitfaced on cider at 3am and he’ll still be telling us about a really cool theorem that relates to the current moment somehow. Maths is an obsession to those who can do it, and mortals like us won’t ever understand. All we can do is stand back and watch them work.
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why the subliminal clown @ 0:51?
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–>DrazharLn “I also think that this is a bit sad. It’s not what gaming is about for me, in fact it is something like the opposite of what gaming is to me. But whatever, each to their own.”
Yeah, i know what you mean, but for some people ‘to master a game is the same as what this guy did, speacilly old school gamers i think… have you seen the documentary ‘the king of kong’, about some guys that fight, almost literally, to see who is the king (of score) in donkey kong? its a really great movie, but today the games evolved to a story centric media, and im not complaining, i tottally prefer this way.
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Terrifying but suitably dramatic.
…
Still, terrifying.
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Yea, but where does the Mayor’s Mansion go?
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u just min maxed this thread
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Anyone else find this video scarily reminiscent of the 70′s movie “The Andromeda Strain”?
Just as creepy if you ask me….
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I always thought that’s how you’re SUPPOSED to play simcity. At least that’s how I played it :D
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Reply fail…
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