Furious edge-of-your-seat bus route scheduling ACTION!

Paradox Interactive has announced that it will be publishing developer Colossal Order's game Cities in Motion, billed as the "ultimate public transport simulator." Player's are put in charge of running a mass transit company with scenarios based on the cities Vienna, Helsinki, Berlin, and Amsterdam and a time frame spanning 1920 to 2020. This sort of thing is right up my alley, and I definitely like what I see so far.



The subject matter may be mundane to some, but I'm a a lifelong resident of Illinois. When you live in a state where the two consecutive governors preceding the current office holder are now both convicted felons, several streets in yout area have had half of their lanes closed for "repairs" since President Taft was in the White House, and every news story that references roads invariably includes some combination of the words "scandal," "extortion," "bribe," "racketeering," "federal grand jury," and/or "will neither confirm or deny allegations of ordering Chicago Outfit assassins to conceal the alderman's severed head in the Governor's Mansion," the very concept of well-run transport infrastructure is strange and exotic.

This sort of game is probably the biggest reason I remain interested in PC games despite generally preferring consoles. The reactions of gamers to this sort of niche strategy game tend be split them into into two pretty sharply defined camps, in my experience: Those who find the prospect of spending hour after hour designing subway systems in a simulated 1950s Finland utterly fascinating, like yours truly, and those who have already started to nod off from sheer boredom just reading the words "designing subway systems" and would be in danger of slipping into a coma if they suffered extended exposure to the actual game.

Sadly, as has been demonstrarted by the commercial failure of games like 2009 multiplatform title Call of Duty: Postwar Highway Reconstruction and the PS3's critically acclaimed but financially disastrous recent entry to the Shin Megami Tensei series, Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. The Transport Workers Union of America, one of these groups is not large enough to provide the sort of sales needed to support console development costs. So it's definitely nice to have the PC for niche titles like this.

Victoria 2 is doomed, DOOMED!

I kept it off this blog for the sake of decorum when it happened, but I squeed like a teenage fan girl reading a fifty-chapter Sephiroth/Naruto/Sonic the Hedgehog slashfic when I learned a few weeks ago that Paradox Interactive was actually making a sequel to Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun, one of my all-time favorite strategy games. Paradox head honcho Fredrik Wester was convinced to approve the project by Paradox lead programmer Johan Andersson after the Paradox forum community clamored for it. Wester has said that he does not expect Victoria II to turn a profit, citing the catastrophic, Hindenburgesque launch of the original Victoria, and has said that he will shave his head if proven wrong.

I actually know a guy who lost his hair in a bet. A few years back, he vowed- presumably while drunk or in the grip of some sort of sanity-blasting psionic mental assault- to shave his head if his beloved Chicago Cubs didn’t win the World Series. If you have even a passing knowledge of baseball, you know that’s sort of like saying that this is the year the entire United States Marine Corps will be vanquished on the field of battle by Steve Urkel from Family Matters, so you can imagine how that turned out. He’s always had a soft sort of appearance, so the shaved really didn’t work for him; the first time I saw him post-shearing, it was as if Winnie the Pooh had joined the Aryan Brotherhood.

Sadly, I have to say I share Wester’s pessimism; the fanbase for intimidatingly complex historical grand strategy games with a focus on economics and industrial development named after notoriously prudish British heads of state is a devoted one, but it’s not terribly large. (Which I can only assume to be the reason Paradox has thus far shown no interest in my design document for Cromwell: A Short-Lived Theocratic Commonwealth Under the Sun. Some day...) I certainly hope I’m mistaken, though, and I’m looking forward to it.