The new SimCity comes out on Tuesday, and to celebrate the occasion, publisher EA has just released a very cool video of Will Wright—creator of the original SimCity (and The Sims, and Spore)—talking about how he prefers to play.
Above, you can hear Wright chat with current SimCity designer Stone Librande. Also, as EA notes, last week Wright spoke to SimCity creative director Ocean Quigley. Yes, a game about building cities has two lead designers named Stone and Ocean.
I've spent around 30 minutes with SimCity, which comes out on Tuesday for PC (and later for Mac), and I think it's really cool. I could do without the whole online-only thing, but what I've played feels really fun and smooth and genuine. It's a video game's video game: it gives you a set of tools and lets you do whatever you'd like, just like the old SimCitys. It's also somehow both more streamlined and more complex than the old ones. It has a lot of modern comforts—no need to stick power lines or pipes on every square, for example—without discarding much of the ridiculous complexity that makes SimCity so SimCityish.
For more impressions on the game, check out Kirk's big preview.