Video: How To Sell Sim City
Games like Sim City are hard on a trailer. Trailers, coming as they do from cinema, are narrative events - even if only barely - made to get you excited about a movie. Video game trailers often work well enough - even if, in the end, they have little to do with the game itself...ehem. Oftentimes video game trailers are there to sell you on the idea of a game.
But how do you sell a game like Sim City, which is devoid of plot, characters, or even Baysplosions? It's kind of like making a trailer for a book. No matter how enthralling they may be, neither is good subject matter for a trailer. In real life, zoning some industrial land or turning a page can be deeply engaging. On a trailer...not so much.
So the folks at Maxis have wisely been producing gameplay trailers like the one above, teaser videos that show you how the game plays, and, no surprise, actual gameplay would seem to sell the game quite nicely. It doesn't hurt that Sim City is like chicken soup for this gamer, but from the looks of things, the developers at Maxis are trying to build a modern update of a classic model. There are some lamentable changes, including a more-or-less inability to play offline, but there are also some big improvements. Curved roads, anyone?
Sim City comes out for Mac and PC in February 2013.
[via: towleroad]
