Mini Motorways and Mini Metro
I’ve lost numerous hours and gained such a lot gray hair playing these two games, both from Dinosaur Polo Club. They cast you as a road or metro manager trying to assist people of a city get from point A to point B. The visuals are gorgeous, and the short-spurt gameplay is addictive for your own commutes. The best part of this game is the total absence of microtransactions, meaning you can play as much as you want for as long as you want. (Mini Motorways is included in Apple Arcade.)
It is sensible that Apple Arcade's Mini Motorways asks various things of me than Mini Metro because cars are very different from trains. Still, it took me a short time to know quite how I had to approach things, and it took even longer to let all my Mini Metro instincts fall silent.
Mini Metro is a game about making underground systems, creating various colored lines that link together stations marked by a variety of shapes. The point, I think, is to encourage diversity. You want a line that can take any traveler to its intended station, which means a line that covers all the shapes for all the different shapes of traveler. It's wonderfully positive in this regard: it sees cities as places where diversity is a strength, and there's a certain understanding that if you're using public transport you're not going to go on to your destination anyway - most are in it together, which suggests you'll all expect to travel round the houses.
Cars though! Mini Motorway initially looks quite almost like Mini Metro. You have stores and you have houses, and you have to lay down roads to connect the stores to the houses. Basically, the stores make requests and people in the houses have to fulfill them, by sending cars out to the stores and then back to the houses. Rather than dividing things up by shapes, the game sorts by color. Pink houses to pink stores! Orange houses to orange stores.
The instinct at first is to value the time of flight and time of arrival - the quickest route between houses and stores. This swiftly leads to a city in which all the houses and all the stores are essentially connected together: a knot of roads in which multicolored traffic flows everywhere. But cars are more selfish than trains, I eventually learned. And the experience of driving in, say, Los Angeles, is very different from being squished on the tube in London. In Los Angeles, you're separated from the world around you. You're watching a movie across the Cinerama screen of your windshield. You exit of the car slightly unprepared for human interaction as if you're emerging from an extended sleep. And you try to keep contact with others to a minimum.
So the weird truth is that, at my level of skill anyway, which isn't terribly high, Mini Motorways is that the inverse of Mini Metro. It's about separating lines rather than creating diversity. Pink and orange cars using an equivalent roads makes the probabilities of a jam far more likely. So I connect oranges with oranges, pinks with pinks, blues with blues, and I try to never mingle them. This sense of selfishness goes deep. Scandalously for the Mini Metro player, you don't even need to connect all the houses that pop up, because you only really need to worry about the stores. This is a city where the large bullies get their way, and their way, generally , means going to keep to themselves and ignore their slightly different neighbors.
There is judgment in this, I think - there has to be. But Mini Motorways is never an explicitly satirical game. What i really like most about it's that as my cities grow i can not help but see internal organs cropping up everywhere. Oh man, I've made three lungs and a tangle of intestines.
I only play in Los Angeles, because it feels like the right thing to do. And in honor of the spirit of Los Angeles, I only occasionally play the game the right way, these days. I only infrequently keep my colors separate and my roads clean. When I consider LA i feel of the melting pot of Pico, which tangle of highways looped and bowed in spaghetti junctions. I want to honor the reality of LA, and it's a glorious, complicated reality.
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