Simcity

One of my first "modern" pc games (we're not talking frogger or commodore 16 here) was simcity.

The thing that bugged me was that the game was based on an orthogonal grid. Everything was rectangular or square.
Living in the Netherlands, that was the strangest thing. In the Roman town of Maastricht nothing is square... City blocks are based on the road/infra structure of historic routes from one city to another, or the landscape.

So scrolling the U.S. on google maps I go from simcity01.savegame to simcity02.sav to ....
The grid makes cities look exactly like the game (or is it the other way around), which gives these stunning pictures of e.g. Minneapolis (as shown above).

European people tend to criticize America for being artificial.
In some ways it is.

I wonder if that's a bad thing though...