Another book about video games! With so many books about games, you have to find your niche. And that’s exactly what Konstantinos Dimopoulos (love the name) has done in his book Virtual Cities. In a market where there are a lot of books about specific genres of games, their history, the graphics, interviews with their makers and even the box art, there’s apparently room for more, namely the cities in video games.

The book is an atlas and explores the cities in 45 games. This sort of book is always a risk for me, because I haven’t played many of the games that are discussed and probably never will. That’s because huge genres lie outside of my interest, like (first person) shooters, (real time) strategy games and a lot of the AAA-titles, like the Assassins’ Creeds, Thiefs, Silent Hills and Metroidvania, Soulslike and Batman/Spider-Man games.
I’m mainly interested in adventure and role-playing games. And that shows. Less than half of the games in the book are games that I’ve played or want to play. But it always pays to keep an open mind, as my recent foray into the Final Fantasy games proves.

You buy a book such as this not only for the here and now, but also for the future. Who knows what I’ll be playing five of ten years from now? And it also can be fun to read about the cities I’ll never visit. But I think that I will first read about the cities that I have visited though.

Cities I miss in this book are Balmora or Vivec from Morrowind. Britannia from the Ultima games, and a town like Erathia from the Might and Magic games, part VII in this case. But those are all minor omissions when compared to the ones that are there. The only major missing one for me is Baldur’s Gate. When a game is named after a city, and it’s such an important game, I think there’s no reason to omit it.
Sure, there are also games like Krondor and Arx Fatalis, but those do not stand on the same level as Bioware’s seminal game.
Almost the same as goes for Baldur’s Gate goes for the city of Neverwinter. But I guess they had to draw the line somewhere and they chose to include Sigil from the Planescape: Torment game instead of Baldur’s Gate.
I wonder if I’ll think of other major omissions when reading through the book.