stroked SimCity 4

I have been playing SimCity 4 by Maxis off and on for 17 years now, and adoring it with the same fervor as ever. This has been since March 2003, three months following its initial release in January of that year. Its two-disc game platform has made way into the hard drive of my Dell PC, Acer laptop, Mac OS laptop, and now, HP laptop, all these years.

Even though I have likewise played the SimCity 2000 Boxer v. 1.3.2 game, and still have that, I have kept pulling back to my SimCity 4. What a building feat; what building maneuvers with which to get my hands dirty!

I have played video games ever since the Nintendo Game & Watch and the Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom) in the 1980s. I have played a ton of them at home (PlayStation and Sega, too) and in the arcades, including playing the 2-player arcade games with strangers – Virtua Cop, Tekken, The House of the Dead, Time Crisis. Nonetheless, I had a slightly severe right-body stroke in 31 December 2015 and thought, well, that was the end of that – no more Diablo, World of Warcraft, Civilization, StarCraft.

And I was correct! I could no longer use our Nintendo Switch, and most PC games (and computer functions) need two hands to be done properly.

Still, come 2019, the third year of my new stroke-addled life, I thought to inspect if I could maybe start playing SimCity 4 on my laptop once more. Well, I could! I have now been playing a few times a month – to move my one good arm and hand during relaxation, though not too much. Thank you, Maxis, for saving me time and again.