Sims vs Arcade games

Wanna be the greatest person who ever lived, without leaving your house to tell people about it?

Alright, buy a flight simulator if you want to learn how to fly an airplane. play a dating sim if you want to become a ladies man. Rack up a ton of hours in Simcity 2000(woot!) if you want to fix the economy. Everything is possible after playing a simulation(If you believe this, smack yourself in the head right now, please.)

You won't become a jack of all trades by playing simulation video games, but you will attain an understanding of the nuances in the given subject.

Simcity 2000 is one of my all time favorite video games that doesn't feature a fat plumber, pellet obsessed yellow circle, or blue hedgehog.

I learned within the first 5 minutes of playing this wonderful game that citizens are very needy. Sometimes, they ask for things, and you really can't give them everything they want/need all at once. Be it because of a lack of residual income, lack of relevance to your overall vision for the community, or a total disregard for any and all complaints if you have the cold, beating heart of a monster, and just ignore what the people want altogether.

If the people in your city get too upset, they tend to do things like...oh, say, I don't know...Riot?

Yeah, those tiny, ungrateful goobers have the gull to mess up the shiny, yet unfinished utopia that you are trying to build for them, out of the kindness of your own heart.

Even if you aren't the evil dic(tator) type, and actually do your best to keep moral fairly high, natural disasters can swoop in and wreck everything in sight. Don't even get me started on the alien attack ships...

When you have a sports game that features players that can leap 100 feet into the air, catch fire, and and knock down opposing players on the other team without worrying about a visit from the commissioner, it's usually called the perfect game.

For the sake of this debate though, we'll refer to it as an "Arcade" experience.

Arcades are those big cabinets that people used to feed quarters into so they could play Metal Slug X, Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, Point Blank, and countless other titles that all deserve their own specific lens. Arcade games were popular because of their accessibility. Most of these games have a narrow enough learning curve that allowed anyone with basic hand eye coordination to walk up to the machine and play for a few minutes without feeling like a total scrub.

This concept is the polar opposite of a simulation.

The following series'' fit under the guise of Arcade gameplay:

NBA Street
SSX
Daytona USA
Burnout
Trackmania
Mario Kart(and pretty much all cart racing games released after it)
NFL Street

All of these games are built on the principle of fun over frustration. The narrow learning curve of Burnout 3: Takedown, mixed with the spectacular ways one can wreak unspeakable havoc on surrounding traffic, makes of a fun and rewarding experience. That's no to say the ultra realistic approach of Gran Turismo games isn't good as well. It's fun for a different reason.