![]() ![]() There’s a variety of maps, each loosely based on a real-world city, meaning real-world topography such as rivers will impact how you approach matters. The look of the game is simple, and yet at the same time it feels a disservice to use such a word to describe its artistic presentation. Even as I see the road systems overloaded, a failure and game over looming, I’m never mad: I just spring into action, trying to drop down an emergency motorway or roundabout to provide a shortcut or ease the flow of traffic. And yet… something about Mini Motorways evokes none of that stress, of that frustration. The sprites for gridlocked roads from SimCity SNES and SimCity 2000 are seared into my mind from the many hours they spent taunting me. I love city builders, but the intricacies of road design and avoiding traffic jams are always my least favorite part of titles like Cities Skylines. ![]() In reality they are very similar, but also different in a few precise and cleverly-calibrated ways that ultimately make Mini Motorways the far superior of the two. That game was built around railway infrastructure - but the freedom of the open road means that somehow the options you have on the table at any given moment gives this game’s action the impression of being less constrained than its predecessor. If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s very similar to a Dinosaur Polo Club title, Mini Metro. If things get too clogged up, it’s game over. Buildings are color coded - so blue homes will spit out cars of the same color that need to make their way to blue businesses - and therefore quickly the game’s randomly spawning infrastructure will force you to make hard decisions about moving around resources to keep the city moving. Your job is to carefully juggle the needs of the city with the resources you have, producing a layout that minimizes traffic jams. You have a limited amount of roads and accessories such as roundabouts, traffic lights, bridges, and of course motorways at any given time. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Buildings large and small crop up as time progresses, and your job is simply to connect everything up in a sensible manner that encourages further growth. You create a city, but this isn’t a typical city builder: all you have to do is craft the road system. Originally released via Apple Arcade and now available on PC, the concept of the game is blissfully, eighties-design era simple. With that said, every now and then a game pops up that I truly cannot lay any significant fault at - and one such release is Dinosaur Polo Club’s Mini Motorways. And optimization with multiple factors is always a balancing act - you can only truly optimize one thing at a time, and our goal in this game is to make sure that the "longest road" (the longest distance any one car will have to make to reach a corresponding destination) is as short as possible.Does a perfect video game actually exist? I think there’s a strong argument for the idea that a truly perfect game - or any piece of art, for that matter - can never really happen. Keep in mind that this does NOT apply in every situation - The more houses you have, the more competing goals you will have in the name of optimization. Firstly, your cars will drive shorter distances on average, and you will also end up using fewer tiles for longer distances, rather than stairstepping everything. This is one of the easiest ways to step up your game, and the benefits are twofold. It might be tempting to just draw a road to the left, like this:īut the more optimal way would be diagonally, which shaves off a fraction of a second for any car pulling in: Optimizing Road TilesPretend I have to connect this light blue store to some houses that are coming in from the south. Some stores that appear may have two buildings in them (keep in mind, you can direct traffic THROUGH these! can come in handy, but don't divert a huge amount of traffic through them or the cars can't service them!).įurthermore, if you're coming from Mini Metro, you might distress when a few houses are formed way out toward the edge of your map - this is okay! Houses are just "car generation resources" and can't cause you to lose - it just means you might need shorter roads to the other houses of that color and their destinations to pick up the slack. You'll notice that, save for challenge criteria, some "square" buildings might be upgraded to "circles". It should be noted that there are several different types of buildings, each with a different "pin generation rate", so to speak. ![]() If you let that timer build all the way up, it's game over! If too many build up in a particular building, a timer begins, accompanied with a "ticking" sound. Pins are located at "destinations" (stores and other buildings). They are happy when they can travel to a pin and go home. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |