No game captured my imagination when I was growing up like SimCity. Certainly, a part of it was my God complex, but more it was the open-ended nature of a game with few rules that let you build a city. I spent countless hours on my computer playing it; I even spent countless hours on the Super Nintendo playing it when it was ported to that console. Now it’s coming to the iPhone–countless hours will be lost again.

I got a chance to play a near-complete version of it today; it looks great. Fans of the series will recognize the SimCity 3000 look and feel, but the addition of touchscreen controls makes sense for things like zoning (creating a certain type of building zone). Using the multi-touch capabilities of the iPhone to do things like zooming in and out of your city also makes the game a good fit for the device.

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Second Life may be getting more real by the day. In a post on the Second Life blog on Monday, Jack Linden describes the Linden Lab plan to better regulate the Mainland, the section of virtual land that’s managed directly by Linden Lab itself. With the implementation of a Department of Public Works, Second Life residents were alerted to a Linden Lab that wants to be more involved and regulate more of the user experience.

The new plan is still vague, but seems to center on the concept of zoning. One of the most frequent user complaints is the proliferation of ad farms in-world where a virtual world parcel is filled with nothing but ads for other in-world businesses, and the post suggests that Linden Lab will take steps to control what is viewed by many in Second Life to be akin to an adult bookstore moving in next door.

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