There must always be a Lich King Grease Pit.

It’s been a long time since I last played a SimCity game; I remember as a kid I used to be obsessed with the series, back to its humble beginnings, and one of my favourite ways to play the game was to load one of the pre-built cities — SimCity 1‘s Boston was a great choice — and then impact the populace with a veritable Pandora’s box of disasters, starting with a few nuclear meltdowns and following up with earthquakes and fires, enough to level the city and leave barely scraps of polluted, wrecked, burning wasteland behind. From there, I’d build up a new civilization upon the ashes of the old, Mad Max-esque nightmare world.

The other thing I used to love doing started with SimCity 2000, where it became the goal of myself and a friend to build the ‘perfect’ city, which generally meant cramming as many arcologies together as was physically possible, not to mention building a ridiculously elaborate and fancy garden around ‘my’ house in the game. Skip forward to SimCity 4 and, with the help of a custom region file I hacked together years ago (which provides a region several times larger than what the game would normally allow), it’s time to combine those two goals into what is bound to be a logistics nightmare: an attempt to create the biggest city I’ve ever made, while simultaneously ruling with unparalleled levels of sadism and cruelty. Welcome to the freshly-founded hell of New Gomorrah.

The first day — which is to say, the last few hours before I haul myself off to sleep — has been short, but eventful. New Gomorrah and its first sub-city, the capital of Socketrape were founded, a substantial and obligatory industrial zone was formed, Bob’s Grease Pit (the first commercial venture to rear its ugly head) was made into a historic building to ensure that there will always be a Bob’s Grease Pit, and I dropped a sizeable chunk of burning cosmic rock into the middle of the freshly-populated residential zone, partly because it seemed appropriate, and partly because I just felt like being an asshole. What better way to drive the fear of god into these people (metaphorically speaking; it’s more like a fear of angry nerd) than to crush their puny homes with the unstoppable might of a fucking meteor, and watch the fire spread like… well, like wildfire. It didn’t take long for the wretched leeches to rebuild upon the ruined terrain, anyway, though I think I’ll leave the meteor crater as-is, something for those peons to remember me by.

But alas, the hour is late, so the city must remain further unscathed for the moment. Next time, things are really going to get ugly.

Next: Rise and Fall

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