Top 6 Least Liveable (Videogame) Cities - Features

You think your neighbourhood is rough? Be glad you don't live in a video game!

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Top 6 Least Livable (Videogame) Cities

Megaton – Fallout 3

Besides being located in a nuclear wasteland and constructed out of sheet metal, Megaton’s main selling point is a big fat unexploded nuclear bomb in the town square. There’s a reason realtors don’t exist in the Fallout universe. (The struggle to sell dwellings that may come under attack from giant ants, super mutants, and raiders is titanic.) And I’m not sure if I would drag my family across an obliterated landscape with the help of a two-headed donkey only to live under the constant threat of sudden and complete atomization. I wouldn’t be signing any papers.

Lost Wages – Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards

If you’re into gambling, venereal diseases, awful taxi service, winos, and sudden alley beat downs, you’d love Lost Wages. The setting for the original Leisure Suit Larry game, Lost Wages is one of those places that you’d be hard-pressed to even like visiting; never mind taking up residence unless you really like the idea of a world that contains only a bar (with a resident prostitute upstairs), a wedding

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chapel, a convenience store, a casino, and a disco.

Pacific City – Crackdown

Normally any city that includes a superhuman on the payroll would be selling point. Yes, gang activity is very high, but it’s on a sharp decline (plus!) thanks to the bounding Agent hurling cars into the sky (minus!), dropping explosives from the rooftops (a definite minus), and

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possibly jacking your car (depending on your car, a minus) in the line of duty. If that weren’t enough, there are no schools in this gentrified metropolis! It’s little wonder that criminal activity is so high.

New York (reasonable facsimile of) – Lots of Games

New York is always suffering some kind of gaming calamity whether it be Mutant Turtles terrorizing the sewers, renegade and/or bad cops, Soviet troops dropping into downtown, Central Park being ripped to pieces by some kind of demonic invasion, illegal immigrants and semi-legit businessmen bent on revenge, alien symbiotes attacking its inhabitants, or some dude in a hoodie tearing things up. All reports indicate that the real world New York is an awesome place to live/work/visit but if you were suddenly locked in a videogame version of the city just get the hell out. And don’t look back.

City 17 – Half-Life 2

The only thing worse than living under the rule of Dr. Wallace Breen and Combine Civil Protection, is living under the rule of Dr. Wallace Breen and Combine Civil Protection without wanting to have sex thanks to that damn suppression field Breen keeps crowing about. If random beatings and no sex drive weren’t enough to keep people from visiting this Eastern European prison city, that massive Citadel smack in the middle of the city has “trouble” written all over it. Bad things happen in places where the skyline is dominated by a large phallus. Just ask people that have escaped Toronto.

SimCity – SimCity

Any SimCity I ever created always ended the same way: In flames.

The little electronic Sims living in the deplorable conditions I created – those Sims that didn’t just leave for a better city and instead chose to hang on with their fingernails to a pitiful existence – were very close to developing enough sentience to delete SimCity from my hard drive so they could achieve blissful release from their electronic Hell.

It’s understandable.

Taxes were way too high; fires raged out of control for months as there was no fire protection in place; crime was astronomical; the nuclear power plant in the middle of most residential areas weren’t welcome; two schools for a population approaching 100,000; roads that went nowhere; public transit that had no stops between its terminus stations; and the constant earthquakes, floods, tornados, and monster attacks didn’t win me any supporters.

Clearly, the least livable place on this list is any city I designed in SimCity.

- Aaron Simmer

(July 22, 2009)