Starting a New Read

I can scarcely believe my luck. At a stroke, within a day of each other, both the DVD drive of this laptop and my brand-new two-day-old portable drive failed, leaving me with a uselessly clicking hunk of metal in a hollow portable container and a drive that spins with anticipation, with optimism, pauses - and then gives up unconditionally. The laptop itself is still top-notch to use, and I daresay I still have nothing significant to complain about after a month and a half of using it. Indeed, times like this, when I am sitting on the floor of my room with StreamingSoundtracks.com playing in the background, and when I am typing out a day's thoughts, have become an integral, necessary part of my day. But without a functioning optical drive, the most valuable capabilities of this machine, and its potential for top-notch display, will be unable to be realised. And the prudence of a backup to the onboard drive is clear to anyone.

Had bought the SimCity Box on Monday along with my new (albeit failed) drive, with the thought of finally getting my hands on the SimCity 4 Rush Hour expansion pack. My intention was to install the expanded SimCity 4 in this laptop, as a foil against boredom or homesickness in New York - although one may think me utterly pessimistic or cynical to anticipate boredom and homesickness in a place as captivating and promising as New York. And anyway, I had wanted Rush Hour since it was released more than four years ago. But now that my DVD drive has broken down, there is no question of installing it on this machine yet.

The SimCity Box also came with three other games, namely the new SimCity Societies, the Destinations expansion for that game, and this weird concoction called SnapCity. The latter game, I think, has no place in the SimCity Box, simply because it was not a SimCity game that had been previously released, and so it doesn't represent any stage in the development of the franchise, back from when Will Wright first programmed the original SimCity (which came on something like ten floppy disks - remember what those were?), until SimCity 4 and Rush Hour brought his vision to a whole new level. As a longstanding fan of SimCity games, I found that the inclusion of SnapCity reeked of opportunism and a lack of artistic integrity on the part of EA.

And SimCity Societies also raised heckles among the fanbase when it was first released. First of all, its development had already drawn fire from the fanbase, because the game departed from the tried-and-true game basics of zoning, infrastructure planning and municipal finance, to replace it with a rather shoddy concept that doesn't resemble real-world city development at all. SimCity 4 ran on the well-deserved mantle of being the most realistic city simulator ever programmed - and even today, five years after its release, no other title even comes close. SimCity Societies, then, seemed like not only a step backwards, but also a step clean off the tightrope strung between the developers' artistic and professional standards, and the demands of the fanbase.

But I still bought it anyway, since SimCity 4 and Rush Hour cost $40, and for $10 more I could get three other games, even if I didn't actually want them. How's that for Singaporean giam-siap-ness? And, incidentally, notice how the older SimCity actually seems to be worth more than Societies, as demonstrated by the price difference between the two packages. Well, as it turns out, SimCity Societies demands a lot of computer power, and though I think this laptop can actually take it at a stretch, it would not be able to play the game over long periods of time (which is just as well, then, that my optical drive gave out before I installed the game). Tried it out on a desktop computer, and to my utter surprise, I have been rather hooked on it over the last few days.

That is not to say that SimCity Societies is better than SimCity 4. Far and away, the older SimCity is a better city simulator, in almost all respects save its graphics capabilities. It is also clear that Societies is far too easy, and for players of the older SimCity games, who expect fiendishly tenuous balances, compromises, macro-level decision-making and micromanagement, Societies was quite like a joke. It's like handing an engineer a box of Lego. But that being said, Societies is actually a good game. It seems clear to me that Societies is meant to appeal to the crowd that likes The Sims, because the city-building concept in Societies resembles how you build houses in The Sims: placing every architectural feature, every piece of furniture and every decoration and layer of paint by hand, paying painstaking attention to detail. But when you approach Societies from the standpoint of a player expecting SimCity 5, it fails to satisfy. I found myself finding it absurd that I could pick and choose where every building was, and my sims would happily live, work and play in all of them, even if I deliberately chose hellish slums, tenements and sweatshops. It was irritating to have to place every building, rather than just zoning a piece of land and letting my sims get to building their own world. In short, the sheer lack of initiative on the part of my sims felt fundamentally wrong. Compared to the riotous, demanding and conflicting sims of the older games, their bovine obedience seemed far too easy.

But then it occurred to me - SimCity Societies isn't about realism, but about artistry. It's a game meant for creativity, not for rigour. Where cities created in SimCity 4 inspire respect, because of all the careful effort that has gone into it, cities created in Societies attract the viewer. Where cities in SimCity 4 are awe-inspiring, cities in Societies are pretty. And when that clicked, when it became clear that Societies was not fulfilling my expectations because I was expecting the wrong things from it, I started to have fun with the sandbox-style of play, creating neighbourhoods one building, one plot, one tree, one prop at a time. With the sheer range of tools and objects, one can really get down and dirty and add texture and atmosphere to one's creations. And I remembered how, when I had played The Sims once upon a time, I had tried to use the Hot Date expansion to do the same thing: create detailed, realistic facsimiles of real-life neighbourhoods.

One of the real drawbacks of the game, though, is that you can attain a perfectly static steady state at any stage in your city's development, meaning that once you've built up every inch of space, there really isn't any incentive for you to keep playing that city. You can just walk around in its streets and admire the views; but there is absolutely no incentive to redevelop. While in older SimCity games, entire blocks were liable to be rebuilt according to shifting environmental factors, in Societies, you build 'em and forget 'em. You could leave the city to run happily by itself, and no changes would ever happen; no changes would ever need to happen. In a sense, then, this departs wildly from the old SimCity premise of being an endlessly engaging, open-ended game. Societies isn't open-ended because there is no real incentive to progress. But for this drawback to be corrected, we will have to look to the next instalment of the city-simulation genre, whether it comes from this franchise, or a new challenger to the crown.

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Anyway - uncharacteristic gaming rant aside, I have started to read King Lear today, and just finished the first act. I've had the script for years now (it was a present from Britain back in the JC days), but have not had the time or patience to give it a go, even though I've watched two productions of the play. Now, I have the time.

But I still lack the patience, I think. I find it rather annoying to have to keep referring to footnotes to find translations and explanations for the old-style English. It feels like too much effort to have to spend so much time and brainpower to decipher the syntax even before one can ponder on the meanings, and certainly, when I started the first scene, and found that I had to refer to the footnotes practically every other line, I had thought to myself that it was not too late to give up and read something else. But the quality of the language, the intricate word-use, the sheer delight of the stageplay, and the oft-lauded themes and philosophies of the play have kept me engaged so far. Even though it takes an added effort on the part of the modern reader to understand Shakespeare, one must look past one's own troubles to appreciate the clear indications of the genius at work in the words that are there, have been there, and will always be there.

Haven't made much headway yet, but already, Lear seems to be a particularly compelling character. On the one hand, he is wont to be overcome by bouts of self-destructive irrationality, during which he seems quite frankly like a total fool, flailing wildly about, unconscious of the true extent of the power he wields, and thereby hurting the people most dear to him by either using overwhelming force, or finding he is impotent to stop affairs from rolling on out of his control. And so, on the one hand, he is the maker of his own doom, and quite culpable he is, too, for bringing it onto himself. But on the other hand, he seems perfectly self-conscious between the bouts of choler, and he is able to reflect on his own faults, and ponder (albeit uselessly) on how things had come to this. He may not be able to control himself when he acts as the agent of his own doom, but he is doubly cursed by being equally unable to avoid realising the sheer scale of the mess he has gotten himself into. He may irritate one, he may infuriate one, his doom may even seem to be justifiable; and yet, even at this early stage, one cannot help offering him a measure of pity.