Why It's Impossible to Recreate Cities in SimCity 4

I haven't gotten around to the BAT, but I did try to fiddle around with WINE, which I wanted to try before jumping into Windows on my Mac. I was disappointed that it wouldn't run stand-alone apps (like, for instance, I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game) or when it was "full screen" it wasn't truly full screen (in a demo of Crayon Physics Deluxe, the Dock popped up whenever the mouse went down there).

But I have given thought to SimCity 4, and why it's impossible to recreate major cities.

Aside from the obvious BAT issues...each city has a number of notable buildings in its skyline, but unless you're working with an extremely recognizable skyline (Chicago or New York, for instance) you'll have a very difficult time installing a believable skyline.

Let's look at one of my favorite cities, Houston.

It doesn't seem so bad on the surface...reorient the diagonal northwest-southeast streets to north-south, and you've got a workable area, right? There's even a light rail running through Main Street, which can be easily recreated with something like this.

But the light rail splits up, and parallels two different roads.

And it gets worst. Try recreating this iconic traffic circle near the Museum District, or these spaghetti-strand style interchange.

See that bike trail dissipating into that tan path? That's a former railroad line. It would be practically impossible to get that railroad bridge over a messy highway, a bayou-style river AND a railroad (or a bike trail). And the bayou is so significant, yet hard to do successfully (those LA ditch mods will NOT do the trick).

Worst yet, you have to deal with trademark refineries, and the dozens of railroad spurs that connect to the canal.

The grid also changes orientation constantly. Sometimes it is north-south by default, and sometimes...well, see for yourself.

But Houston is not the only one that cannot be recreated. That's just a good example.

The thing is, city-recreating in SimCity 4 is extremely difficult. The best shot you'll get is to get a collection of buildings from the skyline (or at least something that kind of resembles them), throw in some labels (you know, introduced in SC4RH), and hope for the best. You'll get something contrived, but good enough for a CJ.