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I took the new SimCity Societies game out for a test run the day before Thanksgiving. This being the holiday season, a time of cheer and good will toward man, I want to focus on the positives.

Well, it was pretty.

Beyond the expected face-lift to keep up with continuing progress in the graphic capabilities of home computers, the buildings’ designs were well done, and considerable attention has been given to creating several “matched sets” of buildings from which to choose. You can thus design cities with a real feel to them, from sleepy country towns to 1984-style police states, or you can create hybrids to suit your aesthetics: surround State U campus with resentful trailer parks, or couple your upper-class playground to the kind of manufacturing that can fuel it. The engine cooperates by subtly altering background colors and noises to match, so you’ll see rich sunsets in a Norman Rockwell church town, and trash will dot the sidewalks of an industrial hell.

I watched over someone’s shoulder and got very enthused at the prospect. It looked great! We got our own disk the next day.

Yes, sir, the game sure is pretty.

Yup.

[…]

Oh, who am I kidding? Graphics don’t make a game; gameplay does. There’s no gameplay here. Any significan goal is insultingly easy. I achieved every goal the game provides—all ten themed goals reached and all buildings unlocked—on my first town, the one that’s supposed to be riddled with stupid errors committed while learning how to handle the game properly, avoiding pitfalls and taking full advantage of opportunities. Each building made available (“unlocked”) by reaching minimum requirements remain unlocked for every game played thereafter; you can start your second game with high-rise apartments and megamalls, skipping individual houses and corner stores entirely. Each achievement entitles you to a small cash income in every future game.

Not that you’d need it. The only expense Societies mayors suffer is new construction. Gone are the maintenance costs for power plants, the costs of funding hospitals and police stations, the need to watch your budget. You literally cannot overbuild: housing, businesses, or entertainment venues may go unused, but they cost you nothing to keep. Massive over- or under-employment is no concern; your sims don’t care a fig whether they work, nor whether they can afford the consumer venues they visit. Indeed, work is entirely for your benefit; the city’s income comes strictly from income tax, collected at the end of every working day at a rate that would make Croesus blush. If you build faster than your budget can sustain, wait a week; your new Olymmpic stadium will be ready.

Maxis included some potential for strategy in the form of building synergies: a corporate tower, for example, might periodically generate a manager who will temporarily raise the income of the first building he enters, or a museum might beautify its immediate neighbors. You have good reason, then, to plan your construction to maximize these small perks, surrounding the corporate tower with high-income buildings that would benefit most from a consultation, or the museum by cheap housing whose residents suffer poor esthetics. Unfortunately, you don’t need these benefits, some of which act as a positive distraction from the more profitable occupation of slapping out more buildings.

The old residential-commercial-industrial zoning system has received a makeover. In place of the RCI triad are houses, workplaces, and venues. Workplaces are your source of tax income, housing provides workers to staff it, and venues, mostly shops and entertainment, boost worker happiness to the point where they will continue working. Working slowly lowers happiness, although certain events can do so as well; once a worker gets sufficiently unhappy, he’ll leave his workplace to buy some ice cream or go dancing. The happier you keep workers, the more income tax they’ll provide. Because any venue will do, keeping your sims in a perpetual state of pants-wetting ecstasy is a doddle.

Traffic could, theoretically, provide some strategic interest. Traffic jams eat up your sims’ time, preventing them from working a full day or fully juicing up their happiness between work and home. Until you discover subways, which are dirt cheap, have a tiny footprint, and automatically connect to every other subway—then, traffic is whisked into the dustbin of history. And even before you discover subways, your sims travel pretty quickly on foot, without actually needing roads. Never mind the cars.

Maxis has succeeded on its philosophy of creating “toys” instead of “games,” that is, open-ended simulations in which you set your own goals. It has also suffered from complaints that everything is too easy, which it is for players seeking a challenge. Enabling wild experimentation means refusing to punish what might reasonably be a losing strategy in a more goal-oriented simulation. Societies suffers from this shortcoming in spades. Maxis has worked so hard to make sure the city of your dreams can survive, no matter how nonsensical, no matter how ill-conceived or ill-managed, that there is no challenge of any kind. Every city works. Want a city staffed with nothing but clowns and cheerleaders, where everyone lives in tree houses? No problem. Want a city where your trailer trash visit the nightly opera? No problem. But because every city works, no matter how badly you screw it up, there’s no sense of achievement in managing a successful city.

SimCity got its inspirational beginning as a design utility for another game. Will Wright was designing a typical shooting game, wherein the player piloted a bomber over enemy countryside. To speed the process, he created a small utility to help design the landscape, placing target buildings and trees and so on. To his surprise, he found he liked laying out buildings in a realistic or esthetically pleasing fashion using the utility better than he liked bombing them into pixilated oblivion in the actual game. So inspired, Wright developed the first SimCity, and went on to fame and fortune. With Societies, the SimCity line has come full circle: the title goes so far in removing all challenge to give you the maximum ability to put any building wherever you want that the latest CivCity in CivNation is not a management sim; it’s a city drawing utility.