Beach City
// October 4th, 2009 // Cities
The Old White Hotel
Beach City is another one of the first cities in Blue Mars, and is located on a beach (Shocking!).
On first arrival, you’ll find yourself in a sort of plaza area, with fountains, planters filled with palms, and casual seating areas. Surrounding the plaza is a network of interconnected buildings that seem to be the bare-bones skeleton of a future retail/residential complex. Across from these is the crown jewel of Beach City; the Old White Hotel.
The Old White Hotel is an interesting piece of architecture; it evokes the feelings of a grand old resort hotel in New England, with its clapboard siding, trim details, covered porch and sumptuous lobby. Out back of the lobby is a lounge area where visitors can sun themselves, or just relax. The interior of the lobby is well appointed, with a beautiful chandelier hovering gracefully over an ornamental table and urn. While the Old White Hotel is graceful and elegant, the rest of the buildings in Beach City bear no resemblance, and frankly seem out of place. The complex surrounding the Old White Hotel is merely a bunch of boxes piled on one another, all with stone exteriors. The textures also seem a bit low in quality, but they’re more than likely placeholders, since the stone and tile isn’t as “beachy” as clapboard siding and doesn’t really fit into the cities theme. Also, the complex of boxes is very jumbled; there’s no particular path, and there are some dead ends that should be open to the walkway on the other side of the sometimes pointless half walls. The current layout of the complex would be fine if there were distinguishable landmarks, but all the buildings look essentially the same, with minor variations that are repeated in each ‘block’.
A Typical Block in the Complex
Another short coming of Beach City is that there really isn’t much to do, yet. The small boutique store and the golf shop are little more than demos, and we can’t buy anything in them (yet). The boutique looks the most promising of the two, and shows off what can be done with the cloth editor to achieve fantastic results. Outside of the two shops are a couple of really cool Vespa type scooters, but they aren’t ridable. Also, the very intriguing hovercraft parked in front of the hotel is non-interactive. Basically, Beach city is lacking in personality.
Intriguing Hovercraft, or Electric Razor?
True, the hovercraft is very original, but it still lacks in depth. Why is it parked in front of the hotel? Is there a story behind this?
While the city area of Beach City is quite bland right now, the surrounding area is somewhat interesting to explore. There’s the beach, of course, but there’s also a wooded mountain range that we found to be a great place for a hike. The largest and nearest mountain is an excellent climb, and lends great views of the surrounding countryside. There was even a trail to follow, once we had gotten pretty far up the mountain! Looking down from the summit, we could see the city center again with it’s rows of blocks and Old White Hotel. And then it struck us at how large Beach City really is.
City Center in Low Left, Parcels to the Right
We could even see evidence of parcel outlines, perhaps for future development and/or sale. Details about land have been hush hush, but it’s interesting to see how much room there is between these ‘parcels’; it looks like public land is being given a priority.
Whatever is going on in Beach City, it’s quite obvious that the development of it has a long way to go, and that’s okay. Being able to see something this late in development is great because it allows us to watch it grow and blossom.